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Rovi had accused Amazon of infringing on two patents, one which creates an electronic program guide on a television screen and another which allows a viewer to select and purchase a pay-per-view program.

In both patents, Judge Richard Andrews of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware narrowly defined what the "claims," or portions of patents, did in such a way that forced Rovi to drop its argument for infringement.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which specializes in patent appeals, agreed with the lower court.

The online retailer, infamous for undercutting rivals and pressuring suppliers, hopes that making nice with game developers will help it build a vibrant app platform on its new Fire TV and gain ground in an area where it severely lags the competition.

For example, Amazon last year contacted London-based developer Ashraf Hegab out of the blue. In contrast to the sink-or-swim style of Apple's and Google's app stores, Amazon promised to promote his game actively if he brought it to its platform, he said.

"With Amazon, it feels a lot more intimate and personal," said the founder of eight-month startup Playir. "With Apple, you get feedback, but it's a more formal Q&A. You feel like you're being judged."

Gaming is the top revenue generator and one of the top five activities on smartphones and tablets, and to catch up, Amazon must compete with rivals Apple and Google for users and developer time.

Last week, Amazon doubled down on its gaming strategy with Fire TV, a palm-sized $99 streaming device that also allows users to play games on their televisions and, executives hope, will help displace some of the millions of costlier Microsoft Xboxes, Sony Playstations and Nintendo Wiis in households.

For nearly 20 years, Amazon - a company that Chief Executive Jeff Bezos nearly named Relentless.com - has been anything but friendly in its drive to offer customers the lowest possible prices on everything from kitchen knives to diapers.

But game developers say Amazon has forged a bond with developers over the last two years by offering marketing support, feedback and other perks. It is building credibility by hiring respected veterans for its in-house gaming studio.

It has offered discounts on Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing service used by a majority of startups. And in some cases, it is even giving them money to test its ad services.

"We obsess about making that easier and easier - the tools that we provide, the support we give through our business development teams," Mike Frazzini, vice president of Amazon Games, told Reuters in an interview.

Some remain skeptical of the Fire TV's ability to go head-to-head with Apple TV, or edge out the top-selling PlayStation4.

The Finnish smartphone maker announced China cleared a deal in a statement Tuesday. The deal is expected to close by the end of the month.

Shares of Nokia surged 5.5% to $7.62 in morning trading.

Microsoft's $7.2 billion deal to acquire Nokia's devices division had been scheduled to close last month, but was pushed back by a month to secure additional approvals in Asia.

Nokia continues to contest tax claims in India, where authorities want the company to pay taxes on devices made at a plant in the country.

Armed pro-Moscow protesters were still occupying Ukrainian government buildings in two cities in the largely Russian-speaking east on Tuesday, although police ended a third occupation in a lightning night-time operation.

Ukraine's security service said separatists occupying the security headquarters in Luhansk had planted bombs in the building and were holding as many as 60 hostages. Activists in the building denied they had explosives or hostages, but said they had seized an armory full of automatic rifles.

The Ukraine government says the occupations that began on Sunday are part of a Russian-led plan to dismember the country. Kerry said he feared Moscow might repeat its Crimean operation.

"It is clear that Russian special forces and agents have been the catalyst behind the chaos of the last 24 hours," he said in Washington, and this "could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in Crimea".

Moscow annexed the Black Sea peninsula last month after a referendum staged when Russian troops were already in control.

Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed Western accusations that Moscow was destabilizing Ukraine, saying the situation could improve only if Kiev took into account the interests of Russian-speaking regions.

Shots were fired, a grenade thrown and 70 people detained as Ukrainian officers ended the occupation in the city of Kharkiv during an 18 minute "anti-terrorism" action, the interior ministry said.

But elsewhere in Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland, activists armed with Kalashnikov rifles and protected by barbed wire barricades vowed there was no going back on their demand - a vote on returning to Moscow rule.

In the city of Luhansk, a man dressed in camouflage told a crowd outside the occupied state security building: "We want a referendum on the status of Luhansk and we want Russian returned as an official language."

The Kremlin's standoff with the West has knocked investors' confidence in the Russian economy, and the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday cut its forecast of growth this year to

1.3 percent, less than half the 3 percent it had originally projected.

Israeli start-up StoreDot displayed the device - made of biological structures - at Microsoft's Think Next Conference.

A Samsung S4 smartphone went from a dead battery to full power in 26 seconds in the demonstration.

The battery is currently only a prototype and the firm predicts it will take three years to become a commercially viable product.

In the demonstration, a battery pack the size of a cigarette packet was attached to a smartphone.

"We think we can integrate a battery into a smartphone within a year and have a commercially ready device in three years," founder Dr Dorn Myersdorf told the BBC.

The bio-organic battery utilises tiny self-assembling nano-crystals that were first identified in research being done into Alzheimer's disease at Tel Aviv University 10 years ago.

The nano-dots are described by StoreDot as "stable, robust spheres" that are 2.1 nanometers in diameter and made up of peptide molecules.

The technology has a range of uses, founder Dr Myersdorf said.

"Batteries are just one of the industries we can disrupt with this new material. It is new physics, new chemistry, a new approach to devices," he said.

The team has also used the nano-crystals in memory chips which could write three times faster than traditional flash memory and as a non-toxic alternative to cadmium in screens.

Dr Myersdorf said that the batteries are likely to be 30 to 40% more expensive to manufacture compared to traditional ones and the final product will be twice as expensive than those on the market today.

But making them should be a relatively easy process.

Eli Lilly and Co, Takeda's co-defendant in the case, was ordered to pay $3 billion in punitive damages by the jury in Louisiana on Monday. It also awarded $1.475 million in compensatory damages.

Legal experts said it was unlikely that such a large award would stand after challenges in court by both companies. Eli Lilly and Takeda have said they would dispute the verdict, which could include appeals to a higher court or filing motions asking the trial judge to set aside or reduce the verdict.

"Although there's no mathematical bright line" to determine how high is too high when it comes to punitive damage awards, federal appeals courts generally scrutinize the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages, preferring those that fall into the single-digit range, according to Professor Catherine Sharkey, a tort law expert at New York University School of Law.

Punitive damages are meant to discourage companies from bad conduct. Compensatory damages are meant to pay victims for their actual losses. With a ratio of more than 6,100 to 1 of punitive to compensatory damages, the Actos award could be highly vulnerable.

"It's definitely the case that the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled to lower courts that they should be restraining very large punitive awards," Sharkey added.

Lilly, which co-promoted Actos from 1999 to 2006, said in a press release it will be indemnified by Takeda for its losses and expenses around the litigation based on the terms of its agreement with Takeda.

Takeda's shares fell as much as 8.8 percent to an eight-month low in Tokyo trading on Tuesday after the verdict. The stock ended 5.2 percent lower at 4,572 yen.

Lilly shares fell 0.2 percent, or 12 cents per share, to $58.50 per share in New York Stock Exchange trading.

The massive award was met with "stunned silence" in the Lafayette, Louisiana, courtroom, plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Lanier said.

Lanier acknowledged it was not certain whether the damages award would be sustained.

"Nobody has gone out and bought a new home," Lanier said.

"This is a conservative judge and a conservative court and she's very 'balls and strikes.' We're not under any grand illusion."

In response to an all-time low in user growth figures during the recent quarter, Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo told worried Wall Street analysts that the company would make a number of changes to freshen up the service.

Tuesday's redesign, while mostly cosmetic, hinted at what Costolo described in February as a willingness to experiment with new ways to organize content. Users can now "pin" a tweet to stay at the top of their feed, a rare instance of Twitter departing from the continuously rolling format that has defined the service.

Tweets that have received more retweets or replies will also appear slightly larger to spur more user engagement.

The new layout, which will be available to a small group of users initially, will be widely deployed to Twitter's 241 million users in the coming weeks, the company said.

Twitter reported higher-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue on February 6, but investors focused on user growth of just 3.8 percent, the lowest rate of quarter-on-quarter growth since Twitter began disclosing user figures. The San Francisco-based company went public in November.

In recent weeks, Twitter has also reportedly been testing a number of new advertising units, such as ads that include download links for mobile apps.

Taking the witness stand, the double amputee - accused of murdering 29-year-old law graduate and model Reeva Steenkamp - recounted hearing a window sliding open in his bathroom in the middle of the night on Valentine's Day 2013.

Conditioned by years of living in crime-ridden South Africa, Pistorius said the noises convinced him someone was breaking into his luxury Pretoria home and that he needed to protect himself and his lover.

"That's the moment that everything changed," he said, his voice tense with emotion. "I thought that there was a burglar that was gaining entry to my home."

"The first thing that ran through my mind was that I needed to arm myself, that I needed to protect Reeva and that I needed to get my gun," said the 27-year-old, who faces life in prison if convicted of murder.

Pistorius said he felt in the dark with his fingers, grabbed a 9mm pistol lying under the bed, then moved on his stumps down the passageway leading from the bedroom towards the bathroom and the would-be intruder or intruders.

"I shouted for Reeva to get on the floor and for her to phone the police. I screamed at the people to get out," he said.

According to his account, as he peered round the door of the bathroom - his outstretched right hand holding the pistol, his left hand steadying himself against the wall - he noticed the bathroom window was open, confirming his worst fears.

"I wasn't sure where to point my firearm. I had it pointed at the toilet but my eyes were going between the window and the toilet. I stood there for some time. I'm not sure how long.

"I just stayed where I was and kept on screaming. Then I heard a noise from inside the toilet that I perceived to be somebody coming out of the toilet. Before I knew it, I had fired four shots at the door."

"CRYING OUT TO THE LORD"

With his ears ringing, he continued to scream for Steenkamp to call the police, he said, until it slowly dawned on him that his girlfriend might have been the one behind the door.

"I was screaming and shouting the whole time. I don't think I have ever screamed or cried like that. I was crying out to the Lord to help me. I was crying out to Reeva," he said, choking back the tears.

He then recounted how he bashed out a panel of the wooden door with a cricket bat to reveal Steenkamp - the woman with whom he said had been planning on buying a house - slumped on the floor in a pool of blood.

NXP in April 2012 sued BlackBerry, then known as Research in Motion, alleging that versions of the BlackBerry phone and PlayBook tablet infringed patents related to the design, data transmission and other features of those devices.

The lawsuit originally covered six patents, but NXP later dropped its claims related to three of the patents. NXP sought unspecified damages, including triple damages.

Jurors needed less than a day of deliberations before ruling in BlackBerry's favor, in a trial that began on March 24, court records show.

NXP is listed on the Nasdaq as NXP Semiconductors NV. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment. BlackBerry did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Litigation remains a major weapon in a global patent war among makers of smartphones, tablet computers and operating software, including such companies as Apple Inc, Samsung Electronics Co and Google Inc.

BlackBerry was once a dominant force in smartphones, but the Waterloo, Ontario-based company has lost much of its market share to Apple's iPhone and gadgets powered by Google's Android operating system.

NXP is based in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and was spun off from Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV in 2006.

In Monday trading in Toronto, BlackBerry shares fell 15 cents to C$8.62. In Monday trading on the Nasdaq, BlackBerry shares fell 14 cents to $7.86.

They find that some three billion years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was pushing itself apart by another 1% every 44 million years.

It is the latest result to come from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS).

The international group clocks the expansion by making detailed maps of the distribution of matter in space.

The hope is such studies can provide further insights on "dark energy".

This is the mysterious force that appears today to be driving the cosmos apart ever more quickly.

What is interesting about the new result is that the BOSS-measured expansion rate 10 billion years ago is quite a bit slower than that expected from the standard model of cosmology.

"This is the most precise measurement that's ever been done, and all I'll say at the moment is that there is a tension there," explained Dr Matthew Pieri, a BOSS team-member from Portsmouth University, UK.

"We expected to see the Universe expanding faster than what we found.

"The disagreement could still be a statistical fluke, or it could be be that the Universe was different to how we thought it was, but we'll have to explore this further to find out."

Theory holds that the Universe has been on a rollercoaster-like ride.

From the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, it expanded rapidly - but that expansion decelerated in the first few billion years under the constraining influence of gravity.

Then, some six billion years ago, the cosmos started to speed up again under the influence, scientists suspect, of dark energy.

The BOSS group has determined both the near and far expansion rates.

And while the near values fit very well with expected numbers, it is the new result for the far Universe that is the cause of some head-scratching.

Two largely independent measurements have been made.

One is to map the distribution of quasars, which are extremely luminous, distant galaxies.

The second measure involves using the light from those quasars to pinpoint the positions of clouds of hydrogen gas along the line of sight to Earth. In both instances, the BOSS team is probing so-called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs).

These refer to the pressure-driven waves that passed through the post-Big-Bang Universe and which subsequently became frozen into the distribution of matter once it had cooled to a sufficient level.

The world's biggest smartphone maker is counting on the fifth version of its flagship Galaxy S smartphone, which goes on sale globally from Friday, to right the ship and prove the technology giant's staying power as a mobile innovator.

But the Galaxy S5 has already got off to a weak start at home, with its South Korean debut marred by a temporary ban on mobile carriers selling handsets and criticism that it lacks eye-catching new features.

Underscoring the challenges, Samsung priced the S5 about 10 percent cheaper than the S4 even though main rival Apple Inc is not widely expected to update its line-up until September. The firm also dialed back on marketing glitz to keep margins stable.

"This strategy gives them price competitiveness that can be leveraged to drive sales volume and defend overall profits," IM Investment analyst Lee Min-hee said.

"The Galaxy S5 isn't something that will awe investors ... and that's mostly the same with high-end phones at this point. Smartphones no longer offer much groundbreaking innovation and are equalizing to a certain degree."

In this respect the Galaxy S5 marks a major shift for Samsung, dropping the emphasis on hardware innovation and instead highlighting features such as fitness aids and sleek design.

JK Shin, co-chief executive and head of Samsung's mobile business, has called it a "back-to-basics" strategy that will help the world's biggest technology company by revenue rein in component costs and make products of wider appeal.

Samsung is likely to estimate a 3 percent year-on-year decline in January-March operating profit to 8.5 trillion won ($8.1 billion) on Tuesday, according to a mean consensus of 40 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. StarMine's SmartEstimate, which gives greater weighting to the more accurate analysts, suggests further downside risk with profit of 8.35 trillion won.

This would mark the second consecutive quarter of decline - the first negative streak since a four-quarter slip in 2010-2011 - and analysts polled by Reuters expect the trend to continue through the July-September period. The company's full quarterly results are likely to be announced by April 25.

"The S5's boost to Samsung's bottom line will be weaker than the S4, as it will have fewer shipments in the crucial early launch period and then sales will taper off gradually," said Seo Won-seok, an analyst at Korea Investment and Securities.

The Islamic Republic and six world powers will hold a new round of talks in Vienna on Tuesday and Wednesday intended to reach a comprehensive agreement by July 20 on how to resolve a decade-old standoff that has stirred fears of a Middle East war.

It will be the third meeting of chief negotiators since February. So far, officials say, they have largely focused on what issues should form part of a long-term deal.

"We will finish all discussions and issues this time to pave the ground for starting to draft the final draft in Ordibehesht (an Iranian month that begins in two weeks)," Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said upon arrival in Vienna.

A U.S. official gave a similar timetable last week, voicing hope that the drafting of an agreement could begin in May.

Iran says its enrichment program is a peaceful bid to generate electricity and has ruled out shutting any of its nuclear facilities.

But the United States and some other Western countries have accused it of working on developing a nuclear bomb capability. Israel has threatened to attack its long-time foe Iran if diplomatic efforts fail.

The relatively upbeat comment by Zarif appeared designed to underline Tehran's commitment to reach a comprehensive deal by the July deadline, though Western officials say wide differences remain between the two sides.

A spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who coordinates contacts with Iran on behalf of the powers, said the discussions would be "detailed and substantial" but gave no details.

"The next round of talks will be an important continuation to explore respective positions on each topic," the spokesman, Michael Mann, said.

The six powers - United States, France, Russia, China, Britain and Germany - want Iran to scale back its nuclear program so it cannot quickly make a nuclear bomb, if it decided to pursue such arms. Iran wants the six powers to lift sanctions that are severely hurting its oil-dependent economy.

TALKS STILL IN EARLY STAGES - RUSSIA

Iran says the powers must respect what it calls its right to a peaceful nuclear program, including the enrichment of uranium. Such activity can have both civilian and military uses.

"We believe that our partners should make important decisions which includes respecting the existing realities and respecting Iran's rights," Zarif said.