Long before Apple ever revealed its latest iPhones and iPads to the public, we knew almost exactly what they would look like and what kind of features they would have thanks to rumors emanating from Apple's Asian supply chain.
Now similar sources are gossiping about a new Apple product.
Today is an incredibly important vote for the future of your digital privacy, but some in Congress are hoping you won’t find out.
Finally, after weeks of delay, the Senate will start debate on the dangerous FISA Amendments Act at 10 am Eastern and vote on its re-authorization by the end of the day. The FISA Amendments Act is the broad domestic spying bill passed in 2008 in the wake of the warrantless wiretapping scandal. It expires at the end of the year and some in Congress wanted to re-authorize it without a minute of debate.
The good news is—thanks for your phone calls, emails, and tweets—Congress will now be forced to debate it, which means we can affect its outcome. In case you forget just how dangerous the FISA Amendments Act is to your privacy, here’s how we described it last week:
Perhaps no tech story was bigger this year than the growth of the crusading hacker collective Anonymous. In a Best of 2012 package, Andrew Leonard considers the group's mission and popularity. Natasha Lennard discusses the group's biggest successes of 2012 with a member. And a slide show looks back at 20 of Anonymous' most attention-grabbing efforts.
In 2012, the loose association of tech-based activists protested bullying, LGBT discrimination, corporate media, Israel, Muslim genocide, police brutality, election-rigging, douchebaggery/bullying, surveillance, “moral education,” and of course Internet censorship—expanding both the range of its “causes” and the tools it deployed to defend them.
Honoring some of the more notable deeds from our elected leaders in 2012.
You might remember that 2012 was the year of the latest most important elections of our lifetime—a chance for all of us to help get the country back on track by electing candidates who would fix the economy, clean up corruption, help the little guy, and protect our rights.
Now that it's over, we can say with some hopefulness that the 2014 primary is less than a year and a half away.
That doesn't mean that many of our local and national leaders didn't distinguish themselves in 2012. Some even deserve gold stars and trophies. Of course, we're too cheap to hand out gold stars and trophies. But we are happy to announce our Second Annual Reader Awards for Political Achievement. We're hoping the winners will be inspired to another year of even better public service.
Police officers handed out $200 grocery store gift cards to people who turned in an automatic weapon, and $100 gift cards to those who provided a handgun, rifle or shotgun.
Los Angeles has held an annual gun buyback since 2009, and similar events have been organized in years past in several other cities, including Detroit and Boston. Police in San Diego had a buyback earlier this month.
Some experts say the buybacks have little effect in reducing gun violence, but Villaraigosa touted the buyback program as one step that can be taken in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14 that claimed the lives of 20 children and six adult staff members.
Nearly two years after the Fukushima nuclear plant suffered a massive meltdown in Japan, some Americans could be just now seeing first-hand evidence of the disaster — and right in their backyards.
It’s certainly been a while since an earthquake and tsunami took down the Fukushima power plant, but the results of that ravaging natural disaster might only now be ending up in the United States. People in Los Angeles, California are already on the lookout for debris that has been washing across the Pacific Ocean since March 11, 2011.
Northern California could soon see "scattered and intermittent" episodes of flotsam from Fukushima washing ashore, says Peter Murphy, a marine debris expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
Nearly 10% of a typical product's price is for packaging.
The global packaging market is worth $429 billion.
Nearly 1/3 of Americans' waste is packaging. Just 43% is recycled after use.
In 2007, Americans threw away 78.5 million tons of packaging—520 pounds per person. That's a 71% increase from 1960.
A 2008 bill written by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) would have required the EPA to find ways to reduce packaging waste by 30% in a decade. It died with no cosponsors.
Main 
