“Let there be light.” Light is the metaphor, opposed to darkness, of enlightenment, knowledge, virtue, and understanding. This primitive division of light and dark forces, of course, dominates nearly all cultures throughout most of recorded history.

Roman Saturnalia

The seven days of Saturnalia was a time to eat, drink, and be merry, beginning December 17, during the darkest days of the Winter Solstice. It was license within careful boundaries; it reversed the social order without subverting it. It was also an opportunity for men to be completely free with their fellowmen, sometimes evolving into homosexual and sometimes also pedophilic relations. The toga was not worn, but rather the synthesis, i.e. colorful, informal “dinner clothes”; and the pileus (freedman’s hat) was worn by everyone. Slaves were exempt from punishment, and treated their masters with disrespect. A Saturnalicius princeps was elected master of ceremonies for the proceedings.

Christmas and Epiphany

After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Roman Saturnalia of the Winter Solstice gradually converted to the Birth of the Sun of Righteousness around 336 in Rome. To separate the pagan from the religious, the Church assigned the 25th, rather than the the 17th through the 24rd, of December, as the natus Christus in Betleem Judeae. In the East, the Feast of the Epiphany (Jan. 6) unified the Nativity, the Magi, and the Baptism as a single event, with Light its revelatory singular theme.

The Christian Calendar has three cycles: The Liturgical Year and the Liturgical Day (the third is the Liturgical Calendar of Feasts). Two dates determine the the Liturgical Seasons: December 25, the Feast of the Nativity, and Easter, Feast of the Resurrection, which occurs on the first Sunday after the full moon of the Spring equinox. These two major feasts of Christianity are marked by heavy use of candles and lamplighting, as Light is the operative metaphor.

But not merely the year, also the Liturgical Day. The Church begins each day with Mary’s Magnificat “give light to those who sit in darkness” as its Matins canticle, welcomes dusk with “O gladsome Light” as its Vesper canticle, and closes the day with Simeon’s Nunc dimittis with “my eyes have seen the light,” as its Compline canticle — Light that penetrates darkness, anchors our aspirations to knowledge, goodness, and understanding, guiding our paths in the way of peace.

“So let your light shine before others,” quips Jesus, to flocks who seem to prefer darkness.

The Twelve Days of Christmas, which extends from December 25 (Nativity) to January 6 (Epiphany) is predominantly an English tradition, borrowed from its roots in Roman antiquity. Like the seven-day festival of Roman Saturnalia and the eight-day festival of Hanukkah, the Twelve Days of Christmas is not limited to a single day. The Feast of Circumcision, which followed the Nativity seven days later on January 1st, has long been suppressed in the Christian Calendar, replaced by the Feast of the Theotokos (Mother of God) or the Feast of the Holy Name, since the barbaric practice of circumcision is not endorsed by Christianity.

Hanukkah

The Jewish Hanukkah is a minor observance of a “non-biblical”* event, which lights up to nine branches of a menorah in a festivals of lights. The menorah differs from the ancient sanctuary and the tabernacle candelabrum with its seven-branched candelabrum which is lighted to shine as the Tree of Life – imagery reiterated from the Garden of Eden throught John of Patmos’ revelatory dream and in our present day Darwin’s Tree of Phyla (Life).

Hanukkah commemorates events recorded in the “Deuterocanonical” Book of Maccabees, which was rabbinically deemed “scripture,” until Christians found the Septuagint’s prophesy as validating Jesus as the Messiah, which thereupon caused rabbinical revocation.

*Thus, the Deuterocanonicals (a.k.a., Septuagint) are “appended” to Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, but are still deemed “inspired” by the Church. These Jewish stories are written during the Hellenistic diaspora, and thus written in Greek rather than Hebrew. Some of these works, such as Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Baruch, are among the most beautiful wisdom literature ever written, obviously influenced by “pagan” Hellenists.

This Festival of Dedication or Lights celebrates a small band of Jews overthrowing the mightier Hellenist Syrians in recapturing the desecrated Temple of Solomon, circa 165 BCE. To honor Yahweh for their victory, the Jews destroyed the Hellenized gods that populated the Hellenized Temple, purified it, and restored its historical functions (whether it included animal sacrifice is unclear). It also marks the time when Jews returned to their earlier tribal practices of strict observance set forth in the Torah: male circumcision, dietary laws, and ritual purification.

The Christmas Tree

How wonderful it is that the light of the Tree of Life (O Tennenbaum) is represented by the nine-branched menorah and the Christmas Tree, the latter a 19th century German tradition of populating lights throughout its many branches, that has become the Icon of Life itself. Again and again — from the primitive myths of the Tree in Garden of Eden through John of Patmos’ Revelation to the modern biological facts of Darwin’s Tree of Life (Phyla), the symbolic use of trees and lights clearly speaks across cultures and across time. Even secularists and atheists appreciate the natural beautify of pine trees decorated and lighted as symbolizing the birth of life itself, evolving over millennia into myriad of species, and crowned with humans at the top.

Contemporary Relevance

The significance of Saturnalia, Christmas, and Hanukkah today, in an Age of Enlightenment, is that light of faith foreshadows the light of knowledge, where superstition, primitive tribal customs, and myth anticipates an Enlightened Tree of Life as the guiding principle of humanity itself, the crowning apogee of evolution. Sadly, some people prefer to dwell in darkness, in the Age of Goths, the shadow of death, primitive superstitions, and tribal metaphysics. We call them ideologues and warriors, people of the book, rather than people of the light.

To the Light bearers, Bathe in the Light.

Almost one year after African-Americans celebrated the inauguration of the U.S.’s first black president, Barack Obama is rejecting complaints he’s done too little to help a population hit disproportionately hard by the recession.

In interviews with African-American media outlets, he said it’s unrealistic to expect he could solve the myriad economic and social problems facing black America in one White House term, let alone his first 12 months in office.

” This notion, somehow, that because there wasn’t a transformation overnight that we’ve been neglectful is just simply, factually not accurate,” Mr. Obama told the American Urban Radio Network.

“I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks. I’m president of the entire United States.”

“It’s not going to happen in one year … it’s going to take years,” he added.

His call for patience will come as cold comfort for black Americans whose economic fortunes have fallen harder and faster than any demographic group in the past year.

In November, unemployment among African-Americans stood at 15.4%, the highest of any U.S. racial group and more than five points higher than the national rate. Among black males aged 16 to 24 it soared to 34.5%.

The persistent struggles have triggered criticism from prominent African-American lawmakers and commentators. They claim Mr. Obama has mostly ignored the plight of blacks while bailing out Wall Street and the auto industry.

Actor Danny Glover, a prominent liberal activist who was among Mr. Obama’s biggest supporters in the 2008 election, recently accused him of following “the same playbook” as the Bush administration on domestic policy.

Reassuring people about privacy makes them more, not less, concerned. It’s called “privacy salience,” and Leslie John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein — all at Carnegie Mellon University — demonstrated this in a series of clever experiments. In one, subjects completed an online survey consisting of a series of questions about their academic behavior — “Have you ever cheated on an exam?” for example. Half of the subjects were first required to sign a consent warning — designed to make privacy concerns more salient — while the other half did not. Also, subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a privacy confidentiality assurance, or no such assurance. When the privacy concern was made salient (through the consent warning), people reacted negatively to the subsequent confidentiality assurance and were less likely to reveal personal information.

In another experiment, subjects completed an online survey where they were asked a series of personal questions, such as “Have you ever tried cocaine?” Half of the subjects completed a frivolous-looking survey — ­”How BAD are U??” — with a picture of a cute devil. The other half completed the same survey with the title “Carnegie Mellon University Survey of Ethical Standards,” complete with a university seal and official privacy assurances. The results showed that people who were reminded about privacy were less likely to reveal personal information than those who were not.

Privacy salience does a lot to explain social networking sites and their attitudes towards privacy. From a business perspective, social networking sites don’t want their members to exercise their privacy rights very much. They want members to be comfortable disclosing a lot of data about themselves.

Joseph Bonneau and Soeren Preibusch of Cambridge University have been studying privacy on 45 popular social networking sites around the world. (You may not have realized that there are 45 popular social networking sites around the world.) They found that privacy settings were often confusing and hard to access; Facebook, with its 61 privacy settings, is the worst. To understand some of the settings, they had to create accounts with different settings so they could compare the results. Privacy tends to increase with the age and popularity of a site. General-use sites tend to have more privacy features than niche sites.

But their most interesting finding was that sites consistently hide any mentions of privacy. Their splash pages talk about connecting with friends, meeting new people, sharing pictures: the benefits of disclosing personal data.

These sites do talk about privacy, but only on hard-to-find privacy policy pages. There, the sites give strong reassurances about their privacy controls and the safety of data members choose to disclose on the site. There, the sites display third-party privacy seals and other icons designed to assuage any fears members have.

It’s the Carnegie Mellon experimental result in the real world. Users care about privacy, but don’t really think about it day to day. The social networking sites don’t want to remind users about privacy, even if they talk about it positively, because any reminder will result in users remembering their privacy fears and becoming more cautious about sharing personal data. But the sites also need to reassure those “privacy fundamentalists” for whom privacy is always salient, so they have very strong pro-privacy rhetoric for those who take the time to search them out. The two different marketing messages are for two different audiences.

Social networking sites are improving their privacy controls as a result of public pressure. At the same time, there is a counterbalancing business pressure to decrease privacy; watch what’s going on right now on Facebook, for example. Naively, we should expect companies to make their privacy policies clear to allow customers to make an informed choice. But the marketing need to reduce privacy salience will frustrate market solutions to improve privacy; sites would much rather obfuscate the issue than compete on it as a feature.

Bruce Schneier

Pour rester dans le ton de ces derniers jours, voici de quoi moudre le café pour nos amis amateurs de la sneaker au Japanisthan pour la fin de l’année et l’année prochaine. Il semblerait qu’aucun secteur ne soit épargner par cette pandémie ! Plus forte que la grippe H1N1, plus sournoise que la calvitie et plus attractive que les drogues dures ! Et en tant que grand consommateur de cette industrie, je persiste à croire que ça ne va pas aller en s’arrangeant ! Mais qui va s’en plaindre hein ? Tout est une question de mise en valeur du produit comme dans les salons automobiles…

J'achète !

Même si parfois ce dernier n’est pas de qualité et a un prix exorbitant ! Mais comme dirait certains, c’est du capitalisme et il faut faire des marges et réduire les coûts surtout en temps de crise ! Le Japanisthan est aussi connu pour son côté hype dont on ne parle pas souvent ici ! Surement parce que comme l’indique le manifeste, je suis l’un des seuls à faire la bringue et ne pas bouder mon plaisir ! Même si ça devient de plus en plus difficile de trouver de bons spots ! Enfin bref retournons à nos moutons pour vous parler de quelques paires attendues par tous nos mordus de la sneak dans nos contrées ! On commence avec la fin de l’année avec une paire qui a fait rêver les plus grands et les petits comme Haribo ! La Air Jordan XI Space Jam en référence au film de sa Majesté avec les Looney Toons !

Legends never die !

Il parait qu’elles s’arrachent comme des petits pains ! Et vous voulez savoir pourquoi ? La réponse en image :

Le message est clair non ?

C’est sûr que même si on n’est pas connaisseur, on se laisserait tenter à les enfiler ! Mais à la rédaction de Drink Cold, on ne fait pas les choses à moitié et on se méfie des chants des sirènes comme Homère ! Aussi jolies soient – elles ! J’essaierais de vous faire un report objectif même si cette dernière m’a toujours fascinée dans mon enfance à passer mon temps à mater les playoffs avec les Chicago Bulls sur Canal+ en faisant fi du sommeil !

Bonjour les binocles pour mes vieux jours !

La passion je vous dis avec des flammes dans les yeux comme dans les dessins animés ! Et ils ne s’arrêtent pas là les bougres ! Travailler plus pour gagner plus ? Ce ne sont pas des paroles en l’air ! Voici la prochaine qui risque d’arriver l’année prochaine pour tous mes copains hypeux du Japanisthan La Air Jordan VI Infrared ! Pas besoin de lunettes 3D pour pouvoir admirer le chef d’oeuvre :

The one and only !

Quand je vous dis qu’après l’été, c’est l’hiver et les autres saisons qui risquent d’être chaudes ! Et pas de besoin d’aller jusqu’à Copenhague pour s’en rendre compte ! Comme dirait NTM, parfois ça se passe là, devant toi juste sous ton nez ! Préparez vos budgets comme dirait si bien notre ami le Roi Heenok ! Il n’y en aura pas pour toutes les bourses, c’est moi qui vous le dit !

The recent accusations made about Shane Sparks of, So You Think You Can Dance has the media buzzing.

A past lover of Sparks, claims to have been a minor during their fling. Sources are saying their “relationship” lasted for almost four yrs, and at the time the victim was 15.

Like Spark’s, attorney I find it to be an opportunistic attempt on the part of the victims part. As soon as this black man has his accomplishments recognized, they are threatened with the shadow of a disgusting accusation.

Sparks shot to fame as a choreographer on the 2004 movie You Got Served before joining SYTYCD.

His work on the Fox reality hit garnered him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Choreography, after which he was tapped to be a judge on MTV’s dance-themed competition, America’s Best Dance Crew, which just wrapped its fourth season.

I am in support of Shane and hope that he is able to prove his innocence and have justice prevail.

If he is unable to prove his case he will be fingerprinted and a DNA sample will be put on file in the national database of sexual offenders. I don’t want that for the Emmy nominated Choreographer.

Props: E News

I’ve been waiting for this one…More pics & description below…

That’s right, folks, you shouldn’t be so surprised that Google decided to make the first Android Google Phone after all. Baptized the Nexus One, which implies the fact that more Nexus versions will follow, Google’s first Android phone is rumored to be produced by HTC and launched at some point early next year.

We already have some pictures of the phone and there are even some rumored specs for us to take a look at. But before we proceed any further I’ll have to make one thing clear. I am expecting the Nexus One to beat the Motorola Droid in features and specs and I really hope that Google’s first phone will be able to fight the iPhone 3GS and, most importantly, the next-get iPhone that Apple is surely going to announce next June.

The Nexus One will apparently be available as early as June 5, 2010. While T-Mobile seems to be the official carrier of the phone, Google plans to let you purchase the handset off contract too. And in case you will want to use your AT&T SIM card with the Nexus One, that’s going to be supported too. Should the Nexus One become a hit phone like the iPhone did, Verizon and Sprint will miss out on all the action.

When it comes to actual specs and features, it looks like the Google phone will run the all new Android 2.1 which comes with animated home

screens, 3D elements, new grid icon at the bottom of the screen and more. You can also expect GPS support and all the Google apps you can handle including the Google Maps Navigation
system and the Google Goggles visual search engine.

Other features include a 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED touchscreen display, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 5-megapixel camera with flash.

Naturally there’s no word on pricing details yet and we have no idea what other markets will get the Nexus One in the near future. But we’ll monitor the progress of the Nexus One closely for you in the weeks to come.

Via:Rap Radar

It was around this time last year that our esteemed founder, Jason Montes, first gave us the heads up on the rising cost of comics.

“Starting in January,” Jason emailed the staff of WCBR, “Marvel’s going to raise the price of the majority of their comics to $3.99. We need to follow this, because this is going to be a huge issue for our readers going forward.” I saved Jason’s email because I agreed with and believed in the value of his request, and wish dearly that he was still with us to read this column because I think he would have really enjoyed it. With the emergence and increase in the number of titles with $3.99 price tags from Marvel and DC, it seems to me that the industry has reached an important crossroads that will need to be addressed immediately if it’s going to keep the audience it has, and grow the audience it wants. A conflict is brewing over your buying dollars and how the comic industry wants you to spend them. On one hand, monthly, serialized comics continue to be the staple crop of Comicdom, although their sales figures have been a pale reflection of what they used to be fifteen to twenty years ago. On the other hand, graphic novel releases of serialized comic storylines are gaining in popularity as well as sales in local comic shops and major book retailers like Borders, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble; such serialized comic storylines are now tailored and written for their release as graphic novels.

This has created an interesting dichotomy and strangely symbiotic relationship, where monthly comics are written for their release as graphic novels, and graphic novels rely on monthly comics to generate the stories they need to sell to you and audiences that don’t otherwise walk into comic shops. Where Marvel and DC are hoping to increase their margin on these stories though is on the hope that you will double dip and buy these stories in both formats, a notion made more convincing by the recent deluge of price hikes across a wide range of their best-selling titles by best-selling authors. Now more than ever, I think the time for us has come to take a hard look at the industry and what we’re paying for every week.

I believe it was back in July that John Turitzin, Marvel’ General Counsel and Executive Vice President to the Executive Office told a financial conference that the price increase on a range of Marvel’s comics was part of a process of finding out how much money they can make from publishing monthly comic books. “We’re always testing our pricing on our comic books,” he told the audience, “to see the extent of which we can, you know, it is inelastic, and we can increase our profit in that business.” Basically they wanted to make more money selling monthly comic books, and you can see their logic in this decision in how they initially charged comics produced by popular creative teams. From practically everything written by Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar, Jason Aaron, Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, Ed Brubaker, and a host of mini-series and one shots, Marvel is making a sensible business decision by increasing the price of those comics from popular creators that they know you want. And I’m okay with that, oddly enough. After all, it’s not personal. It’s just business.

What’s been bothering me though is the quality of those monthly comics, more and more of which I’ve been paying a premium to read. It’s not that they’re necessarily bad, it’s just that as a once a month slab of entertainment, I feel like they’re failing to actually entertain me. It occurred to me that the reason for this is essentially the difference between reading a book and a comic. Perhaps I come from an older school of comic reading, but I remember a time when the ritual of reading a comic every month was a dynamic experience, a slab of entertainment that an immediate impact on the reader while also contributing to a large ongoing story. With the advent and popularity of graphic novels though, the focus seems to have shifted from making each monthly comic an entertaining experience unto itself to making it a chapter of a, typically, six-month storyline. With the pacing of these plots being drawn out to accommodate their collections into graphic novels, I feel that individual comics are making for a more uneven, less thrilling reading experience. In fact, looking over my reviews over the last year, I see that the one complaint that crept up most often was how underwhelming most issues were because of their failure to provide any immediate entertainment value, which should, I’d argue, be one of the hallmarks and qualities of a monthly comic book.

Marvel and DC are trying to circumvent this though by putting extra content, usually in the form of eight-page back up stories, into some of their $3.99 comics. While this might increase the page content of comics to the point where the companies feel they can justify a price increase, I feel this is little more than smoke and mirrors that distracts readers from the glaring deficiencies of the main stories. I began reading the back up stories, first offered by DC, with mild interest, and have eventually skipped over them all together. It’s not that I need more pages to agree to pay $3.99 for an issue, I just need more entertainment value, and I’ve yet to see either company offer that in a satisfying way.

So at some point I finally asked myself, “if these creators are writing for their graphic novel releases, why don’t I just wait for them?”

And that, ultimately, is what I’d like for you to consider today, because the temptation to double dip and buy these stories as comic and then graphic novels is harmless when months can go by between the release of the former and latter, but if when you’re paying $3.99 an issue for a six issue story, and then another $20 to $24 for the graphic novel of that comic, well, that takes a huge toll on your pocket book, which is good for Marvel and DC, but not so much for you. I’ve asked myself these questions over the last year, and realized that Jason was right: this has been a huge issue for me as a reader, and it’s one that is very much affecting my buying habits. Just recently, Incredible Hercules, one of my favorite titles, jumped on the $3.99 bandwagon, but as much as I enjoyed seeing Agents of Atlas come back in some readable form, it wasn’t enough to keep me reading the title, and I am now waiting for it to come out in graphic novels before I pick it up. I’ve been doing that with a lot of my titles, and I have that going into 2010. I’m going to be reading fewer comics and more graphic novels, because for the life of me I can’t determine which format the industry is trying to sell me on, but I know I can’t go on buying both of them in equal quantities.

With that in mind I leave it to you to look at your own pull lists to see what, if any, revisions need to be made. My only goal here is to offer you a very simple, direct line of reasoning to consider; one that I hope will help realign and improve your buying habits in the new year. No matter what Marvel and DC try to sell you, how much they charge for it, or why they try to justify their business to you, remember that this is your money we’re talking about here and your entertainment that’s at stake, and those are two very, very important reasons to not believe their hype.

Happy holidays everyone!

-Tony Rakittke

Soooooo you’re a tough guy now that Sadaam is 80 feet underground huh? You remind me of this dude I went to elementary school with. Since the teacher is there you wanna pick a fight with the other guy who you KNOW can beat you

…except in this case, he’s dead…..smh Tony Blair….F*ck Outta Here..

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he would have taken the decision to remove Saddam Hussein even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In an excerpt from a BBC interview to be aired Sunday, Blair said: “I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat.”

Blair, who left office in 2007 and now serves as a special envoy to the Middle East, will be questioned next year at an inquiry into Britain’s role in the 2003 conflict.

At the time of the conflict the British government based its decision to go to war on evidence, contained within a dossier it published in September 2002, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) ready to deploy within 45 minutes.

But critics of the war claim the Bush administration had decided to remove the Iraqi dictator by force by the end of 2002 and that Blair was aware of this and had offered his support.

The current inquiry is not a court of law, so it cannot find anyone criminally responsible or even apportion blame. But inquiry members will be able to judge the legality of the conflict.

Despite doubts about Iraq’s WMDs, Blair was defiant about the need for regime change in Baghdad for the sake of peace in the region. He told the BBC: “I can’t really think we’d be better with him and his two sons still in charge, but it’s incredibly difficult and I totally understand.

“That’s why I sympathize with the people who were against [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, you know, in the end I had to take the decision.

“It was the notion of him as a threat to the region, of which the development of WMD was obviously one. He used chemical weapons on his own people, so this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind.”

Last month, Blair denied a claims that Peter Goldsmith, Britain’s Attorney General at the time of the Iraq war, was “bullied” into declaring that the invasion was legal.

According to reports in the British media, Goldsmith warned Blair the invasion was a serious breach of international law in an “uncompromising letter” in July 2002, eight months before the campaign.

In an interview with CNN, the former premier refuted the claim but accepted his reputation had been called into question many times over Iraq. “Over the years I’ve answered questions time and time again about it [the invasion] and am happy to do so again,” he said.

“It was an important decision and it was a momentous decision, in terms of your country and in terms of mine.

“But one of the things you learn as leader of a country is that you have the responsibility to take decisions. Some of those decisions are difficult decisions and some are very controversial… sometimes they can be very bitter, very difficult. That’s part of being a leader.”

Britain has already held four hearings about the Iraq war. But because all were held before the end of 2004 — so close to the start of the war — they were hampered by limited information, political analyst Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University told CNN.

“They didn’t manage to achieve anything like a comprehensive understanding of the paths that led the UK to support the United States in the invasion,” he said. “This will be the first to look at political decision-making that led to the British invasion of 2003, with the potential to tell a full story.”

Britain’s first two inquiries were held by government committees in 2003.

The House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs examined whether Britain’s Foreign Office gave accurate and complete information to Parliament in the run-up to the war. It found the government exerted no improper influence on the drafting of the dossier given to Parliament on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

The Intelligence and Security Committee then examined whether intelligence about Iraq and its weapons was properly assessed and accurately reflected in government publications. Its findings were mixed.

The next two inquiries had narrow mandates, looking at specific aspects of the war. The Hutton report from January 2004 investigated the death of David Kelly, a leading microbiologist and former U.N. weapons inspector who committed suicide months earlier. Kelly had worked for the British Ministry of Defence, advising it on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but was later found to be the source of a BBC report that said the government had exaggerated evidence to justify war on Iraq.

Following that came the Butler inquiry, which looked at the accuracy of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and elsewhere. It found some of the intelligence sources were “seriously flawed,” but that there was no evidence of deliberate distortion or culpable negligence by spy agencies.

The legal battle between Finland’s Nokia and its US rival Apple has taken a new turn, with Apple countersuing Nokia over alleged patent violations.

The move follows a Nokia lawsuit filed in October accusing iPhone maker Apple of 10 Nokia patent infringements.

Now Apple, in turn, is claiming that the Finnish phone firm is infringing 13 of its technology patents.

“Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours,” Apple said.

Apple has not yet revealed which patents are at issue. Nokia was unavailable for comment.

In October, Nokia said it had not been compensated for its technology, and accused Apple of “trying to get a free ride on the back of Nokia’s innovation”.

The 10 alleged patent infringements by Apple involve wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption.

The breaches applied to all models of the iPhone since its launch in 2007, Nokia added.

Finland’s Nokia said that it had agreements with about 40 firms allowing them to use the firm’s technology, but that Apple had not signed an agreement.

The CIA has cancelled a contract with US private security firm Blackwater for its operatives to load bombs onto drone aircraft in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

CIA Director Leon Panetta wanted such work to be done by the organisation’s own employees only, officials said.

The New York Times revealed the existence of the secret contract with Blackwater, renamed Xe, in August.

On Thursday, the paper also reported that Xe employees had been involved in “snatch-and-grab operations” in Iraq.

Xe, based in North Carolina, changed its name from Blackwater after several of its employees were accused of killing 17 civilians in a shooting incident in Baghdad in September 2007.

Four men are due to stand trial next year.

‘Joint operations’

Earlier this year, Mr Panetta ordered a review of the company’s contacts to be sure its operatives were only performing security-related work, intelligence officials said on Friday.

At this time, Blackwater is not involved in any CIA operations other than in a security or support role CIA spokesman George Little

Afterwards, a contract with Blackwater Select, a division which handles classified operations, to load missiles onto CIA Predator drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan was cancelled, they added.

A CIA spokesman, George Little, said Mr Panetta had since ordered that the agency’s employees take over the task.

“At this time, Blackwater is not involved in any CIA operations other than in a security or support role,” he told the New York Times.

The statement came a day after the paper quoted various unnamed current and former Blackwater staff as saying that in Iraq between 2004 and 2006, colleagues were involved in raids on suspected militants almost every night.

They said that, at one point, joint operations in Iraq and Afghanistan became so routine that Blackwater personnel sometimes were partners in missions instead of just providing security for CIA officers.

Former Blackwater employees also alleged that they provided security on some CIA rendition flights transporting detainees between prisons in different countries.

One former CIA officer was quoted as saying: “There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.”

Xe has insisted it was “never under contract to participate in covert raids with CIA or Special Operations personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else”.

“Any allegation to the contrary by any news organisation would be false.”

The House passed legislation Friday aimed at preventing the next big financial crisis, ushering in the most sweeping set of changes to the banking regulatory system since the New Deal.

The bill, which passed 223-202, imposes more oversight and stronger capital cushions for the largest banks and Wall Street firms. It forces them to pay a total of as much as $150 billion into an emergency fund that could be tapped when a troubled company needs to be taken over and broken up.

The legislation also calls for the regulation of some derivatives and creates a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to regulate products such as credit cards and mortgages.

“We are sending a clear message to Wall Street, the party is over. Never again will reckless behavior on the part of the few threaten the fiscal stability of our people,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a press conference after the bill passed. “The legislation will finally protect Main Street from the worst of Wall Street.”

On the Senate side of Capitol Hill, the bill is moving much more slowly and final passage is likely months away.

As chairman of the House Financial Services committee, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has spearheaded the financial reform package since last Spring — especially the part that creates the Consumer Protection agency.

“The bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns would be not possible — made illegal — under this bill,” Frank said. “If a company fails, it’ll be put to death.”

Overhauling the financial regulatory system has been a major priority of the Obama administration, which has been involved in almost every step of the nearly year-long process. High ranking Treasury officials visited House Speaker Pelosi’s office this week, when some parts of the bill appeared in trouble.

“This legislation brings us another important step closer to necessary, comprehensive financial reform that will create clear rules of the road, consistent and systematic enforcement of those rules, and a stronger, more stable financial system with better protections for consumers and investors,” President Obama said in a statement.

House Republicans have been united in their opposition, saying the bill would provide a permanent bailout of Wall Street and a step toward socialism. One of the bill’s lead opponents, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said it would impose “sweeping draconian powers” on private businesses.

However, over the past several months, the bill has faced its biggest hurdles among Democrats.

Conservative Democrats picked apart different sections, especially the consumer protection agency, saying they worried it would hurt small businesses.

In fact, the plan for the agency has been watered down from the version first proposed by the White House. It no longer would examine and enforce consumer protection rules at 98% of credit unions and banks, most of them smaller. It also would not regulate auto loans, even though auto loans are among the most common issued to consumers.

The Congressional Black Caucus held up the bill at one point, citing displeasure with the lack of support for loans and jobs to those in minority communities.

To smooth things over with those lawmakers, the bill transfers $3 billion from the federal bailout program to provide emergency loans capped at $50,000 to unemployed homeowners to help them prevent foreclosure.

It also would redirect another $1 billion of bailout money into federal neighborhood stabilization programs to redevelop abandoned or foreclosed homes.

Here’s what else it would do:

Federal Reserve: The bill would allow Congress to order the Government Accountability Office to audit Fed activities, which the Fed says would interfere with the central bank’s ability to carry out independent monetary policy.

Derivatives: The bill attempts to shine a brighter light on some of the different kinds of complex financial products, called derivatives, that are blamed for bringing down financial companies such as American International Group (AIG, Fortune 500) and Lehman Brothers. It would pass some of these derivatives on to clearinghouses, which would help pinpoint the value of such trades. However, some derivatives would still be unregulated, including those traded by big agricultural and airline companies to mitigate risk.

Oversight: It creates a new oversight council that would look out for major problems at large financial firms, giving the Federal Reserve a key role in enforcing tougher regulations on larger firms.

Breaking up: It would also give regulators new powers to break up companies that have grown too big, if they threaten to destabilize the financial system.

Executive Compensation: It would give shareholders the right to a nonbinding proxy vote on corporate pay packages.

The House rejected, by 223-208, an amendment that would have effectively killed the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, replacing it with a council of existing regulators.

The members also voted down, by 241-188, an amendment that would have given bankruptcy judges new powers to lower balances on mortgages in order to prevent homeowners from losing their homes in foreclosure

(Wired) — Apple has sent a clear message to any developers who try to game its iTunes App Store. Software developer Molinker has been kicked out, along with more than 1,000 of its iPhone applications.

The Chinese developer had, according to some estimates, 1,000-plus applications in the store, most of which were copycat knockoffs of existing applications.

When a friend of writers at the iPhoneography photography blog saw these rather poor applications consistently scoring 5-star reviews, they got suspicious.

Some investigation showed that Molinker’s applications were getting many top ratings and almost nothing in the 2-to-4-star range. In fact, the only other ratings were often 1-star, and likely the only truthful feedback on the apps’ pages.

iPhoneography wrote a long letter to Apple’s marketing boss, Phil Schiller, and posited that Molinker was giving out promotional codes — essentially free copies of the applications — in return for these 5-star reviews.

In almost all cases, these reviews were poorly written, and came from customers who almost exclusively reviewed just Molinker applications.

This scam was so effective that the applications regularly rose to the tops of charts. One, called ColorMagic, even made it into the Staff Favorites section of the store (which brings some doubt as to whether these are actually staff picks at all).

After a week of typical Apple silence, iPhoneography wrote again, and received a reply direct from Schiller: “Yes, this developer’s apps have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either.”

So what, you say? Some dodgy developer got its entire portfolio chucked down the memory hole, and the App Store continues as if Molinker had never existed.

First, the scale of this purging is huge: 1,000 applications represents almost 1 percent of the entire App Store offering. This alone shows that Apple is happy to do whatever it takes to keep its house clean.

It also shows the power that Apple has over those that sell in its exclusive marketplace. Sure, Molinker was caught cheating, and punished, but Apple could pull the same trick on any developer, for any reason.

We don’t think that it would, butiPhone developers are a nervous bunch as it is, rubbing on rabbits’ feet and crossing their fingers as their creations make their way through a fickle and seemingly arbitrary approval process.

And what about the customers? We doubt that Molinker will be refunding all the money it has made selling the applications (plus 30 percent on top that went to Apple, and is non-returnable).

This means that, at best, these customers can keep using their now-banned apps until a future OS update breaks them. Perhaps, though, they should have bought better applications in the first place?

This is the key. Because there is no clear way to try-before-you buy, the shareware model that works so well for computers, the ratings are absurdly important to choosing an application.

Molinker’s scam, then, is almost a symptom of the App Store setup itself. Can Apple actually be blamed for the rise of the ratings

(CNN) — Facebook has joined forces with five Internet groups to help protect kids, the social-networking site said.

“We believe that the only way to keep kids safe online is for everyone who wants to protect them to work together,” Elliot Schrage, a Facebook vice president, said in a statement Sunday.

“The formation of a board to advise specifically on safety issues is a positive, innovative and collaborative step toward creating a more robust safety environment, and we are thrilled that such a well-respected, trusted group of organizations has joined us in this endeavor.”

Making up the advisory board are Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and the Family Online Safety Institute.

Facebook’s announcement comes less than a week after it added new privacy features, including the ability for users to select who can see each post made to the Web site.

The highlight is deciding which Facebook friends see updates, photos or other posts at the time they’re posted — “something many of you have asked for,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said.

“In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy-settings page simpler by combining some settings,” he said.

A letter on the Web site said that, in the next couple of weeks, Facebook’s roughly 350 million users will be asked to review and update their privacy settings. A message on the site will explain the changes and take users to the page where they can update the settings, Zuckerberg said.