World News papers... 6-11-2013 ScienceTechnology

Cook, who has seen Apple's stock fall 37 percent after it touched a high of $705 in September as competition in the key smartphone market escalated, began by describing the growth of Apple's app store.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan said the activists were entitled to serve their lawsuit on Baidu's lawyer in New York, without infringing China's sovereign protections.

Saying the issue had never been analyzed in detail, Furman on Friday night rejected Baidu's contention that allowing service would turn the part of the Hague Convention that China invoked into a "dead letter" by letting a court circumvent it.

The convention is a multilateral treaty that makes it easier to serve court papers internationally.

In their May 2011 lawsuit, eight New York writers and video producers had accused Baidu and China of conspiring to suppress their political speech from Baidu's search engine, the country's most widely used.

The plaintiffs said the content could be found via search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing, and Google's YouTube. They sought millions of dollars in damages for alleged violations of their First Amendment rights and human rights law.

Furman had dismissed the lawsuit on March 25 but put the dismissal on hold to let the plaintiffs propose another means to serve Baidu.

In giving the plaintiffs another chance to pursue their case, Furman said the Hague Convention was designed to ensure "sufficient" notice to recipients abroad of court documents.

Allowing service in the United States "in a manner that does not call upon China to effect service (in that country) does not override its invocation of its own sovereignty and security; to the contrary, it honors that invocation," the judge wrote.

Carey Ramos, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan representing Baidu, declined to comment.

Furman gave the plaintiffs 30 days to serve the complaint to Baidu's U.S. lawyer, and 120 days to serve China through diplomatic channels.

Stephen Preziosi, a lawyer for the activists, said he intends to meet those deadlines. "In terms of fairness and procedurally, the court got it right," Preziosi said.

The lawsuit was filed one year after Google Inc pulled its search engine out of China after hitting censorship issues. China has also blocked YouTube and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The deal is expected to be announced this week, though it was unlikely to occur on Monday, another source told Reuters.

"Negotiations are nearly final. There are a couple of details being worked out," the second source said. The source described the remaining details as "logistics" rather than significant sticking points.

Google and Waze declined to comment.

The deal with Google comes after discussions between Waze and social networking company Facebook Inc fell apart last month, according to a report in the technology blog AllThingsDigital. Waze was unwilling to relocate its Israeli-based engineering team to Facebook's U.S. headquarters, according to the report.

Maps and navigation services have become a key asset for technology companies as consumers increasingly adopt smartphones and other mobile devices. Waze uses satellite signals from members' smartphones to generate maps and traffic data, which it then shares with other users, offering real-time traffic info.

Google's existing maps service is among the most popular, which could raise antitrust issues for the deal.

The 4-year-old Waze, which has 47 million users, has raised $67 million in funding to date from firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Blue Run Ventures and semiconductor company Qualcomm Inc.

Waze began looking to raise additional funding toward the end of last year, according to a third source close to the company. As the fund raising process got underway, Waze received interest from several companies about an acquisition, and it switched gears to focus its efforts on an acquisition, the source said.

There had been media reports earlier this year that Apple Inc was in talks to acquire Waze. News of the deal with Google was first reported by Israeli financial newspaper Globes on Sunday.

Amazon expanded its AmazonFresh online grocery business into parts of Los Angeles on Monday, after testing the service in its hometown of Seattle for more than five years.

Amazon offered a 90-day free trial of AmazonFresh in LA to consumers who are already members of Prime, which costs $79 a year for free two-day shipping on millions of products.

After the trial ends, customers will be upgraded to a new "Prime Fresh" membership. This costs $299 a year and includes free delivery of orders over $35 of groceries and more than 500,000 other everyday household items.

Amazon's original Prime service encouraged members to shop more regularly on Amazon.com if they wanted to get the most out of their $79 a year subscription fee.

With its new, more expensive "Prime Fresh" subscription, Amazon is betting that this same consumer psychology will get people shopping for groceries and other everyday items even more frequently.

The full commission will issue a final decision in the case in October.

In mid-2012, Rovi accused a long list of companies of infringing its patents for on-screen guides for TV listings. LG Electronics and its subsidiaries settled with Rovi, as did Mitsubishi Electric Corp and its subsidiaries.

Netflix had been accused of infringing four Rovi patents but was found innocent in all cases.

U.S. consumer electronics company Roku, founded in 2008 to stream Netflix videos, was found innocent of infringing one Rovi patent.

A 29-year-old former CIA employee, Snowden has identified himself as the person who gave the Guardian and the Washington Post classified documents about how the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) obtained data from U.S. telecom and Internet companies.

While preparing his leaks, Snowden left Hawaii for Hong Kong on May 20 so he would be in a place that might be able to resist U.S. prosecution attempts, he told the Guardian.

"Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech but the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, making their views known," Snowden, a U.S. citizen, said in a video interview posted on the Guardian's website.

The NSA has requested a criminal probe into the leaks and, on Sunday, the U.S. Justice Department said it was in the initial stages of a criminal investigation.

The United States and Hong Kong signed their extradition treaty in 1996, a year before the former British colony was returned to China. It allows for the exchange of criminal suspects in a formal process that may also involve the Chinese government.

The treaty went into force in 1998 and provides that Hong Kong authorities can hold Snowden for 60 days, following a U.S. request that includes probable cause, while Washington prepares a formal extradition request. Some lawyers with expertise in extraditions said it would be a challenge for Snowden to circumvent the treaty if the U.S. government decides to prosecute him.

"They're not going to put at risk their relationship with the U.S. over Mr. Snowden, and very few people have found that they have the clout to persuade another country to go out of their way for them," said Robert Anello, a New York lawyer who has handled extradition cases.

However, under Hong Kong's Fugitives Offenders Ordinance, Beijing can issue an "instruction" to the city's leader to take or not take action on extraditions where the interests of China "in matters of defense or foreign affairs would be significantly affected."

Worldwide CO2 emissions rose by 1.4 percent to 31.6 billion tons, according to estimates from the Paris-based IEA.

China is the biggest emitter and made the largest contribution to the global rise, spewing out an additional 300 million tons. But the gain was one of the lowest China has seen in a decade, reflecting its efforts to adopt renewable sources and improve energy efficiency.

In the United States, a switch from coal to gas in power generation helped reduce emissions by 200 million tons, bringing them back to the level of the mid-1990s.

Even though the use of coal increased in some European countries last year due to low prices, emissions in Europe declined by 50 million tons because of the economic slowdown, growth in renewables, and emissions caps on industrial and power companies, the IEA said.

Japan's CO2 emissions increased by 70 million tons, as efforts to improve energy efficiency failed to offset increasing use of fossil fuels after the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011.

TEMPERATURE RISES

Scientists say global average temperature rise needs to be limited to below 2 degrees Celsius this century to prevent devastating climate effects like crop failure and melting glaciers.

That would only be possible if emission levels are kept to around 44 billion tons of CO2 equivalent by 2020.

However, the IEA said the data shows the world is on a path to an average temperature rise of between 3.6 and 5.3 degrees Celsius.

"Global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 are projected to be nearly 4 billion tons higher than a level consistent with attaining the 2 degree target, highlighting the scale of the challenge still to be tackled just in this decade," the agency said.

The IEA urged governments to quickly adopt four policies that would ensure climate goals could be reached without harming economic growth. They are: improving energy efficiency in buildings, industry and transport; limiting the construction and use of inefficient power plants; halving methane emissions; and partially phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.

These would reduce global energy-related emissions by 8 percent or 3.1 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2020, the IEA said.

The uneasy trio of European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank was assembled in haste in March 2010 after Greece's public debt and deficit exploded and it was about to lose access to market funding.

Last week's IMF "mea culpa" report about the failures of the Greek program blew the lid off the fiction that the three institutions saw eye-to-eye on the rescue packages they designed and are enforcing in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and now Cyprus.

Behind closed doors, they clashed over whether Greece should restructure its debt, forcing investors to take losses, and whether Ireland should make bondholders in its shattered banks share the cost of a financial rescue.

They still differ over whether European governments should write off some loans to Athens to make its debt sustainable in the long term, an idea that is politically explosive before a German general election in September.

The public airing of such differences raises the question of whether the Troika has reached the end of the road. All sides are feeling sore but divorce seems unlikely.

The IMF says it lowered its standards to support a flawed program for Greece; the European Commission says it "fundamentally disagrees" with the IMF's view that Greek debt should have been written off sooner; and the ECB says the IMF is applying misleading hindsight.

The Europeans contend that in the acute market panic of 2010, before the euro zone had begun to built a financial firewall, letting Greece default or making it restructure its debt could have caused massive contagion to other countries and perhaps swept away the single European currency.

"It would have been Europe's Lehman moment," EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told Reuters, referring to the 2008 collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers that sparked a global financial crisis.

"I don't recall the IMF's managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn proposing early debt restructuring, but I do recall that Christine Lagarde was opposed to it."

The report on the website of financial newspaper Globes did not cite sources or provide further details.

Last month sources told Reuters the Internet search giant was in talks to acquire Waze, while a second Israeli newspaper reported Facebook was willing to pay up to $1 billion for the firm.

Facebook is delving deeper into mobile technology as it tries to expand its user base.

He gave no details on the number of attacks but said "vital national systems" had been targeted. Water, power and banking sites were also under threat, he added.

"In the past few months, we have identified a significant increase in the scope of cyber attacks on Israel by Iran. These attacks are carried out directly by Iran and through its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah," he told a conference on cyber warfare in his country's commercial hub Tel Aviv.

"Despite the non-stop attacks on us, you hear only about a few of them because we thwart most of them," he added.

Netanyahu established a national cyber directorate in 2011 charged with protecting Israel's computer systems from disruption.

Israel and the United States are widely believed to be behind a series of cyber attacks in recent years against an Iranian nuclear program they say is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Iran says its nuclear activities are peaceful.

Google Inc, Facebook Inc and Microsoft Corp are among the big U.S. technology companies that were outed this week as key sources of data for the National Security Agency (NSA), under a surveillance program referred to inside the spy agency as Prism.

While the companies have uniformly denied knowledge of Prism and said they had not given the NSA direct access to their servers, U.S. officials have confirmed the existence of the program, which President Barack Obama defended as "a modest encroachment" on privacy that was necessary to protect national security.

The program relies on section 702 of the 2008 amended version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets the government collect electronic communications for the purpose of acquiring intelligence on non-U.S. targets that pose a threat to national security.

For electronic service providers, the law says the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington can authorize a company to provide "all information, facilities, or assistance necessary." In return for compliance, the company is compensated for its work and receives immunity from potential lawsuits.

Section 702 is a "broad tool to get the information they are looking for," said Matt Zimmerman, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco civil liberties group critical of the law.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court overwhelmingly approves FISA requests from the NSA, according to Justice Department reports. In 2012, the court received 1,856 applications for electronic surveillance and physical searches. All were approved except for one, which the government withdrew before the court could rule.

All of the court's cases are kept secret, including rulings, and companies are not given details about the investigations they have been asked to provide information for, legal experts familiar with the process say. That encourages compliance as corporate lawyers do not want to hinder probes that may help prevent a terrorist attack, for example.

Any company that objects to a judge's order can appeal to the entire Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but there is no public data on whether they have ever done so. The law allows for further appeals to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court.

Writing in Nature Neuroscience, they said further research into the Arc protein's role could help in finding new ways to fight neurological diseases.

The same protein may also be a factor in autism, the study said.

Recent research found Arc lacking in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

Dr Steve Finkbeiner, professor of neurology and physiology at the University of California, who led the research at Gladstone Institutes, said lab work showed that the role of the Arc protein was crucial.

"Scientists knew that Arc was involved in long-term memory, because mice lacking the Arc protein could learn new tasks, but failed to remember them the next day," he said.

Further experiments revealed that Arc acted as a "master regulator" of the neurons during the process of long-term memory formation.

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The study explained that during memory formation, certain genes must be switched on and off at very specific times in order to generate proteins that help neurons lay down new memories.

The authors found that it was Arc that directed this process, from inside the nucleus.

Dr Finkbeiner said people who lack the protein could have memory problems.

"Scientists recently discovered that Arc is depleted in the hippocampus, the brain's memory centre, in Alzheimer's disease patients.

"It's possible that disruptions to the homeostatic scaling process may contribute to the learning and memory deficits seen in Alzheimer's."

The study says that dysfunctions in Arc production and transport could also be a vital player in autism. The genetic disorder Fragile X syndrome, for example, which is a common cause of both mental disabilities and autism, directly affects the production of Arc in neurons.