Techcordance

Iphone Manuf.

HONG KONG (Reuters) -
One week after the apparent suicide of a Chinese factory worker accused of stealing a carefully guarded Apple iPhone prototype, one question remains unanswered: what happened to the missing phone?
Sun Danyong, the 25-year-old suicide victim who worked at contract cellphone maker Foxconn International’s massive gray and white factory complex in Dongguan, had 16 prototypes of Apple’s new fourth-generation iPhone in his possession, according to the Taiwanese company.
When one went missing, Foxconn’s security guards raided his apartment, according to a report in the People’s Daily. The phone didn’t turn up.
A likely answer, according to security experts, is that the device ended up in the hands of Shenzhen’s notoriously entrepreneurial counterfeiters.
“The copying of prototypes certainly happens a lot in the electronics and IT industries,” said Dane Chamorro, a regional general manager with Control Risks, a corporate investigations consulting firm. “You don’t have to steal them, you just have to borrow one for a day.”

NC Terrorists

RALEIGH, N.C. – A father, his two sons and four other North Carolina men are accused of military-style training at home and plotting “violent jihad” through a series of terror attacks abroad, federal authorities said Monday.
Officials said the group was led by Daniel Patrick Boyd, a married 39-year-old who lived in an unassuming lakeside home in a rural area south of Raleigh, where he and his family walked their dog and operated a drywall business. But two decades ago, Boyd, who is a U.S. citizen, trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan and fought against the Soviets for three years before returning to the United States.
An indictment released Monday does not detail any specific terrorist plans or targets overseas, although it claims some of the defendants traveled to Israel in 2007 with the intent of waging “violent jihad” and returned home without success.
“These charges hammer home the point that terrorists and their supporters are not confined to the remote regions of some far away land but can grow and fester right here at home,” U.S. Attorney George E.B. Holding said. He would not give details of the alleged plots beyond what was in a news release and indictment.

Gideons

Missouri’s South Iron School District has received a favorable court ruling.
The lawsuit goes back to 2006, when the American Civil Liberties Union sued the South Iron School District for allowing The Gideons International to distribute Bibles on the school campus and in the classrooms. A judge initially barred the distribution of the Bibles in the classroom, which prompted the school to enact a policy that would allow the distribution of secular and religious material just outside the classroom, and students who were not interested in the material could simply walk by.
The judge issued an order against that policy as well. Matt Staver is the founder of Liberty Counsel, which is representing the school district.

Layoffs

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US computer networking giant Cisco Systems has laid off between 600 and 700 employees at its headquarters in San Jose, California, in a bid to reduce costs amid slow sales, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.The company has also cut jobs at other branches in the United States, although the total number was not immediately clear, the business daily said, citing a person familiar with the matter.”We are doing everything possible to minimize the impact on employees affected by the limited restructuring,” a Cisco spokesman told the Journal.In February, the group had said it would likely eliminate between 1,500 to 2,000 employees, or three percent of its workforce. In late April, the company had some 66,550 employees.

Legislation

A Georgia congressman and doctor says there is a healthcare financing crisis in America that must be addressed, but the government takeover being proposed by congressional Democrats and President Obama is not the answer.
Legislation introduced yesterday by House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel (D-New York) would impose higher taxes on Americans earning more than $350,000 to help pay for a new government-run healthcare plan. According to Rangel, the 852-page bill [PDF]would raise $540 billion over the next decade by imposing a one-percent “surtax” on Americans with $350,000 annual income. Higher rates would take effect for people earning $500,000 and $1 million.
Congressman Dr. Paul Broun (R-Georgia) warns that 120 million Americans could lose their current coverage because of the government-run plan. He says there are some “frightening figures” that need to be made public.
Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA)”One-point-seven-million — that’s the number of jobs that could be lost as the result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide healthcare insurance coverage. Trillions of dollars,” he notes. “We’re breaking the bank in new federal spending. Ten-billion dollars — this will be the minimum loss sustained by you, the taxpayer, each year due to Medicare fraud.”

Reasons

Lifeway Research

Tremors

LOS ANGELES — Scientists have detected a spike in underground rumblings on a section of California’s San Andreas Fault that produced a magnitude-7.8 earthquake in 1857.What these mysterious vibrations say about future earthquakes is far from certain. But some think the deep tremors suggest underground stress may be building up faster than expected and may indicate an increased risk of a major temblor.Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, monitored seismic activity on the fault’s central section between July 2001 and February 2009 and recorded more than 2,000 tremors. The tremors lasted mere minutes to nearly half an hour.

DOMA

The federal Defense of Marriage Act which protects the traditional definition of marriage may be facing its biggest challenge yet. Massachusetts filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the federal law.We’re taking this action today because, first, we believe that [DOMA] directly interferes with Massachusetts’ long-standing sovereign authority to define and regulate the marital status of its residents,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley.
Massachusetts was the first state in the country in 2003 to legalize marriage for same-sex couples. It is now also the first state to challenge DOMA, the 1996 law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman for purposes of all federal laws, and provides that states need not recognize same-sex marriages from another state.
The lawsuit argues that despite same-sex marriage being legal in Massachusetts, the more than 16,000 gay and lesbian married couples in the state are still denied access to “critically important rights and benefits” because of DOMA.

Fleecing the Flock

With unemployment being sky high and climbing it seems that a person who is looking for work need only look to the ministry to make his or her fortune these days. Take the case of one David Cerullo, the CEO of Inspiration Networks. According to the Associated Press, Cerullo is in the process of building a multi million dollar home estimated to be between nine and twelve thousand square feet on Lake Keowee in Lancaster county South Carolina. Cerullo has built Inspirations Networks out of what was left of the now defunct PTL network, which stood for Praise the Lord (or to some it meant Preachers Taking Loot) of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker fame.

Cyber attacks

SEOUL, South Korea–Cyberattacks that have crippled the Web sites of several major American and South Korean government agencies since the July 4th holiday weekend appear to have been launched by a hostile group or government, South Korea’s main government spy agency said on Wednesday.
Although the National Intelligence Service did not identify whom they believed responsible, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that the spy agency had implicated North Korea or pro-North Korea groups.
A spokesman at the intelligence agency said it could not confirm the Yonhap report, which said that the spy agency briefed lawmakers about their suspicions on Wednesday. The opposition Democratic Party accused the spy agency of spreading unsubstantiated rumors to whip up support for a new antiterrorism bill that would give it more power.
Access to at least 11 major Web sites in South Korea–including those of the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, the mass-circulation daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo and the top Internet portal Naver.com–have crashed or slowed down to a crawl since Tuesday evening, according to the government’s Korea Information Security Agency.