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Samsung, the south Korean electronics giant, could face fines running to billions of pounds from the European commission over its attempts to use its “standard-essential” patents on 3G to ban sales of Apple’s iPhone and iPad in Europe.

The Google-owned smartphone company Motorola Mobility may face similar penalties over its attempts to ban sales of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 through its use of SEPs relating to Wi-Fi and the H.264 video standard.

Both companies could yet receive fines in the US as well, where the federal trade commission weighed in earlier in December in a court case between Motorola and Apple, arguing that Motorola’s use of SEPs amounted to a “hold-up”. Samsung is also being investigated by the US justice department over its use of SEPs in cases against Apple.

The European commission’s competition arm, run by Joaquin Almunia, issued a formal statement of objections last Friday.

The potential fines can run to 10% of a company’s worldwide turnover, which in tSamsung’s case would amount to nearly $15bn (£9.3bn), based on its 2011 revenues of $148.9bn. The commission opened its investigation into Samsung in January.

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Want to know the White House’s key propaganda lines for refusing to allow proper oversight into how the NSA is spying on us all? Well, sit back and read on, because the White House’s “talking points” on why the Senate should reject four key amendments to try to roll back some of the excesses of the broad and massive secret program to collect tons of data on Americans, has been leaked.

If only there were a progressive Democrat constitutional law scholar President, then this kind of shenanigans would be unthinkable.

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Carla walked into my office with despair in her eyes. I was surprised. Carla has been doing well in her four months out of prison; she got off drugs, regained custody of her kids, and even enrolled in a local community college.

Without much prodding she admitted to me that she had retuned to prostitution: “I am putting myself at risk for HIV to get my kids a f—ing happy meal.”

Despite looking high and low for a job, Carla explained, she was still unemployed. Most entry-level jobs felt out of reach with her drug record, but what’s worse, even the state wasn’t willing to throw her a temporary life preserver.

You see, Carla is from one of the 32 states in the country that ban anyone convicted of a drug felony from collecting food stamps. With the release of the Global Burden of Disease Study last week, it bears looking at how we are perpetuating burdens among the most vulnerable Americans with our outdated laws.

If she’d committed rape or murder, Carla could have gotten assistance to feed herself and her children, but because the crime she committed was a drug felony, Carla joined the hundreds of thousands of drug felons who are not eligible.

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Suddenly Steve Martin is asking them to open his nine-night stand at the Universal Amphitheater, in Los Angeles. The opportunity presents a vexing problem. The band has no band.

They turn to Paul Shaffer, S.N.L.’s bandleader. Shaffer draws up a list of candidates. All are crack musicians, highly paid and hard to get.

Belushi rallies, cold-calling the candidates at inappropriately late hours. “This is John Belushi,” he tells Steve Cropper, a noted guitarist. “We’re putting a band together. I need you here tomorrow.”

“There’s no way,” Cropper replies. “I’m mixing an album.”

“I gotta have you.”

“No way. Can’t do it.”

“I gotta have you.”

This continues for an hour.

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An attorney for Hobby Lobby Stores said Thursday that the arts and crafts chain plans to defy a federal mandate requiring it to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill, despite risking potential fines of up to $1.3 million per day.

Hobby Lobby and religious book-seller Mardel Inc., which are owned by the same conservative Christian family, are suing to block part of the federal health care law that requires employee health-care plans to provide insurance coverage for the morning-after pill and similar emergency contraception pills.

The companies claim the mandate violates the religious beliefs of their owners. They say the morning-after pill is tantamount to abortion because it can prevent a fertilized egg from becoming implanted in a woman’s womb.

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Basically, this argument comes down to, “it’s our money, and we want to use it to deprive our employees of their religious freedom, as an exercise of OUR religious freedom.”

They should extend the coverage to every employee, and then do what everyone else has to do in this society, try to convince their employees not to use it. Otherwise, they are using their position of power to violate their employees’ right to be whatever religion, and choose whatever set of morals, they wish.

Obviously, that’s the point. This isn’t about religious freedom, it’s about religious control. Their right to control is more important then their employees’ right to be free.

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We have found that the current practical Newtonian formula for the gravity tide of the Earth implies a hypothesis that gravity travels at the speed of light; furthermore, we have derived and solved the propagation equation of gravity using the observation data of Earth tides from Shiquanhe and Wushi, after correction of phase lag due to the anelasticity of the Earth, and found that the speeds of gravity are from 0.93 to 1.05 times the speed of light with a relative error of about 5%. This provides first set of strong evidences to show that the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light.

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Het federaal parket vervolgt de scientologykerk van België als criminele organisatie. Dat berichten de kranten De Tijd en L’Echo. Het parket vervolgt de Belgische poot van de bekende beweging en twee topmedewerkers ook voor oplichting, illegale geneeskunde, verschillende inbreuken op de privacywet en afpersing.

Translation, Belgium is prosecuting the church of Scientology and two leaders on the grounds of being a criminal organisation, illegal practice of medicine, blackmail and invasion of privacy.