Senate agrees to stop 'nuclear' option

A compromise would approve President Obama's pending nominations to
the National Labor Review Board and the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau.

WASHINGTON —The U.S. Senate reached a loose bipartisan agreement
Tuesday to avert Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's plan to invoke
the "nuclear option" to make it easier for the chamber to approve
presidential executive branch nominees.

"We're basically done -- everything but dotting the i's and crossing
the t's," the Nevada Democrat told reporters following the weekly
Senate lunches.

Under the agreement, Democrats will get up-or-down votes on seven
nominations to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau.

Democrats will have to abandon two NLRB nominees who were
recess-appointed by President Obama, which is under legal review by
the Supreme Court. Republicans, in turn, have agreed to take action on
two new NLRB nominees with the intention of approving all seven
nominations before the August break.

While the bipartisan agreement heads off a controversial maneuver by
Reid to change Senate filibuster rules to lower the maximum threshold
required to approve executive nominees from 60 to 51 votes, Reid
stopped short of calling it a victory.The agreement applies only to
the seven pending nominations, and Democrats warned that the debate
could re-emerge in this Congress. "We got a 'yes.' And I think I
should take the 'yes,'" Reid said, when asked what Democrats achieved
in this fight.

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that
the current accord will not stop the minority from exercising their
rights in future nomination fights. "All the options available to the
minority remain intact," McConnell said.

It is commonly referred to as the "nuclear" option because it
threatened to tear apart the Senate along partisan lines by upending
long-held Senate rules and traditions protecting minority party
rights.

The agreement was secured following a weekend of quiet talks between
senators and a three-hour long meeting late Monday with the full
Senate.

In the first sign of progress, the Senate voted 71-29 Tuesday to move
ahead with the confirmation of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, one of the nominations that had been at
the center of the dispute.

Democrats in particular praised Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for his
efforts to head off the nuclear option, and Sen. Roger Wicker,
R-Miss., for suggesting the Monday meeting. "John McCain is the reason
we're at the point we are," Reid said, "No one was able to break
through but him."
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who also played a key role in
negotiating the compromise, echoed Reid's praise of McCain in securing
a working agreement. Schumer said he and McCain spoke at least 30
times through the weekend and late Monday.

"I think both leaders saw, and everybody saw, that we were so close
that it would be a shame to have an Armageddon, if you will, when we
were so close," Schumer said, adding that the deal was "crystallized"
Tuesday morning.

"It's good for the Senate, and hopefully it paves the way for
continued and more bipartisan cooperation in the Senate. We walk up to
the brink, but we get there," Schumer added.

Schumer said McConnell asked Reid to pledge not to attempt the nuclear
option again in this Congress, but Reid countered he could only do so
if McConnell pledged Republicans would not filibuster executive branch
nominations.

Neither leader could agree to the other's demand for a long-term agreement.

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Google Maps 2.0 for iOS includes iPad support, live traffic and road incident reports

Summary: Google tonight released an update to Google Maps for iOS
making it a universal app that now supports the iPad's native
resolution. Finally.
The new Google Maps for iOS (free, App Store) just landed and it has
native iPad support for the first time. In additional to supporting
the iPad's larger screen, the new version of Google Maps includes live
traffic and road incident reports. The new version of Maps also offers
indoor directions and maps for malls, airports, transit stations, and
more.

According to MacRumors Google Maps 2.0 for iOS does not include
on-the-fly rerouting (like it does on Android), but Google has said
that it plans to add the feature in the future.

Here's the full changelog of the new features in v2.0:

New design for iPad
Enhanced navigation including live traffic updates and incident reports
Explore: A new way to browse and discover popular local places to eat,
drink, shop, play and sleep
Simple 5-star ratings and reviews from friends, plus expert Zagat content
Great deals from your favorite brands with Google Offers
Indoor maps with walking directions for malls, transit stations,
airports and more
No word yet on whether the new traffic and incident report features
are coming from Google's acquisition of Waze in June, but it's
unlikley that Google could have integrated that functionality so
quickly.

The update is being rolled out gradually over the next 24 hours, so if
you don't see it in the App Store yet, check back soon. I was able to
download it immediately on my iPad mini and iPhone 5.

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Google Said to Weigh Supplying TV Channels

If Google has its way, you might someday get cable television the same
way you get Gmail: through any ordinary Internet connection.
Foreshadowing a new challenge to entrenched cable and satellite
providers, Google is one of several technology giants trying to
license TV channels for an Internet cable service, according to people
with direct knowledge of the company's efforts.

No deals are imminent. But Google's recent meetings with major media
companies that own channels are a sign of the newfound race to sell
cablelike services via the Internet, creating an alternative to the
current television packages that 100 million American households buy
from companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Intel is hard at work on one such service and companies like Sony and
Microsoft have previously shown interest in the same idea, called an
"over the top" service because the channels would ride on top of
existing broadband connections. They need support from the channel
owners, though, and so far that has been tepid.

Google, which also owns YouTube, the world's largest online video
site, declined to comment on its television interest. But by
instigating conversations with channel owners about a service that
would compete with the likes of Comcast, the company is taking a
different tack than its rival Apple, which has been trying to
collaborate with both channel owners and their distributors on a TV
offering.

"Google feels the need to beat Apple to the punch," said one of the
people with direct knowledge of the meetings, who like the others
interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity.

Apple's thinking, according to these people, is that any
next-generation television service must be set up in partnership with
existing distributors, in part for quality assurance reasons. A future
Apple service could include a user-friendly interface layered on top
of Time Warner Cable or Cablevision's channel lineup. "Apple's working
within our current ecosystem," one of the people said.

What Google and Intel, and probably others, have in mind is more
disruptive and more difficult. One person involved in the talks with
Google cautioned that the company might end up just selling a library
of TV shows, the way Netflix, Amazon and Hulu already do. But others
said that Google has pitched an easy-to-use subscription service that
would stream a bundle of live channels as well as on-demand shows,
replacing the cable bundles that most households now purchase.

Google, an advertising company at its core, has tried to make a dent
in the television business before. Previous talks with channel owners
in 2011 went nowhere. An attempt at an automated TV ad-buying system
was shut down last year. Broadband in the meantime has continued to
become more popular and more widely available, spurring interest in
alternatives to traditional television distribution.

Google's renewed push was first reported by The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday afternoon. Intel is trying to create a similar over-the-top
service, but it has run into roadblocks set up by Time Warner Cable
and other incumbent television distributors. These include contracts
between existing distributors and some channel owners that prohibit
the channels from being licensed to new competitors like Intel. An
Intel spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday.

Another challenge involves channel owners like the Walt Disney Company
and Viacom, who could stand to benefit or suffer greatly from the
potential service, depending on how it is developed. Some owners doubt
that there is much of a market for cable via the Internet in the first
place, and they are content with the three methods of distribution
they have today: cable companies like Comcast, the satellite providers
DirecTV and Dish Network, and the fiber optic providers Verizon FiOS
and AT&T U-verse.

But if Intel, Google or another firm succeeds in selling a cablelike
bundle, some of those existing distributors would almost certainly
start doing the same thing. That would represent a sea change for the
cable industry, whose firms have historically stayed with their own
regional footprints and avoided direct competition with each other.

One of the reasons DirecTV recently tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Hulu
was because the Web site could have helped position the company in an
over-the-top marketplace.

One of the country's smaller cable companies, Cox Communications, is
already trying what amounts to this service in Orange County, Calif.
There, the company recently started selling a bundle of nearly 100
channels to its customers who have broadband but not cable TV. The
company has called it a "small trial," and it declined to comment on
its status on Tuesday.

"We are still early on, results and customer feedback will determine
if we proceed with any future plans on this product," Todd Smith, a
Cox spokesman, said.

A cable service delivered via the Internet would most likely have to
compete on quality — say, superior features like more space for
digital video recording — rather than on price. That is because, as a
Government Accountability Office report on the marketplace put it last
month, "networks generally offer significant discounts based on the
number of subscribers a provider has. Thus, a substantial disadvantage
that an entrant has relative to a large provider is that it will
likely have higher programming costs, making entry challenging."

But Google, Intel and the others eyeing the television space are
deep-pocketed giants. And they have another thing going for them: in
customer satisfaction surveys, they are a lot more popular than the
cable guys.

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Microsoft puffs cheeks, gets ready to blow whistle on PRISM

SOFTWARE HOUSE and apparently rich source of user data for US
intelligence services Microsoft has asked the US Attorney General for
permission to reveal its cooperation with the US National Security
Agency (NSA) and its PRISM programme.
In a blog post Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel and EVP for legal
and corporate affairs said that the firm can't talk about national
security requests and wants to tell its story.
Smith said that the US government is preventing it from revealing NSA
demands, so Microsoft is going directly to the US Attorney General.
"Today we have asked the Attorney General of the United States to
personally take action to permit Microsoft and other companies to
share publicly more complete information about how we handle national
security requests for customer information," he said.
"We believe the US Constitution guarantees our freedom to share more
information with the public, yet the Government is stopping us. For
example, Government lawyers have yet to respond to the petition we
filed in court on June 19, seeking permission to publish the volume of
national security requests we have received. We hope the Attorney
General can step in to change this situation."
Microsoft is keen to talk, said Smith, and has published what
information it can. It said that reports about its involvement so far
contain "inaccuracies", and lists where and when it might share
something with the law.
Services like Outlook are not the open book that slides and reports
have suggested, Microsoft claimed, and Smith said that Microsoft does
not "provide any government with direct access to emails or instant
messages".
"We are sometimes obligated to comply with lawful demands from
governments to turn over content for specific accounts, pursuant to a
search warrant or court order. This is true in the United States and
other countries where we store data," he added.
"When we receive such a demand, we review it and, if obligated to we
comply. We do not provide any government with the technical capability
to access user content directly or by itself. Instead, governments
must continue to rely on legal process to seek from us specified
information about identified accounts."
The same applies to the VoIP, video and chat service Skype and storage
service Skydrive, Microsoft said. Smith said that Microsoft doesn't
deliver information about its users to anyone, but reviews each
request on a case by case basis and only hands it over when it deems
fit.
Businesses and organisations that use Microsoft's enterprise email or
document services are treated slightly differently, Microsoft said,
and if anyone comes knocking on Microsoft's doors for that information
they are sent directly to the end user.
"In short, when governments seek information from Microsoft relating
to customers, we strive to be principled, limited in what we disclose,
and committed to transparency," said Smith.
"The United States has been a role model by guaranteeing a
Constitutional right to free speech. We want to exercise that right.
With US Government lawyers stopping us from sharing more information
with the public, we need the Attorney General to uphold the
Constitution."

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B37's fellow jurors in Trayvon Martin trial bash her for leading country to believe spoke for them

Four jurors in the Trayvon Martin case issued a statement Tuesday
night bashing a fellow panelist for going on TV and leading the
country to believe she spoke for them.
Just moments after CNN aired part two of its interview with the juror
known as B37, four of her fellow members on the six-woman jury issued
a joint statement.
"We also wish to point out that the opinions of Juror B37, expressed
on the Anderson Cooper show were her own, and not in any way
representative of the jurors listed below."
The jurors added, "We ask you to remember that we are not public
officials and we did not invite this type of attention into our
lives."
In the interview aired Tuesday night, juror B37 said Trayvon "played a
huge role in his death" and that race had nothing to do with it.
The anonymous juror said she believes neighborhood watchman George
Zimmerman, who is half-Peruvian, was "justified in shooting" the
17-year-year high school student.
"I don't think race had anything to do with this trial," she told Cooper.
"I mean just because he was black and George was Spanish or Puerto
Rican, I don't think it had anything to do with this trial," she said.
"But I think people are looking for things to make race play a part."
The jury's post-trial conflict played out as U.S. Attorney General
Eric Holder said he is gunning for "Stand Your Ground" laws.
The nation's top lawman said during a speech at an NAACP convention in
Orlando that the law — which featured prominently during the murder
trial of George Zimmerman — should be reexamined and reformed.
"It's time to question laws that so dangerously expand self-defense
and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods," Holder said, just
miles from the Sanford, Fla., courtroom where Zimmerman, 29, stood
trial in Trayvon Martin's death.
Stand Your Ground laws give the benefit of the doubt to the gunman if
he can prove he fired because he feared for his life. The law, which
exists in some form in more than 20 states, does not require that a
person retreat if possible — a concept Holder said is critical in
legal concepts of self-defense.
"By allowing — and perhaps encouraging — violent situations to
escalate in public, such laws undermine public safety," Holder said.
He did not comment on the Justice Department's ongoing investigation
into whether Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon, an unarmed black teen,
was motivated by racial bias.
But Juror B37 said Zimmerman is only guilty of "not using his senses"
when he confronted Trayvon.
"I don't think he profiled him as a racial thing," the juror said. "I
think he profiled him just as someone in the neighborhood who was
suspicious."
The Rev. Al Sharpton has been one of many civil rights leaders urging
Holder to bring civil rights charges against Zimmerman, who was
acquitted Saturday of murdering Trayvon, 17.
Sharpton announced Tuesday he is organizing 100 rallies in cities
around the country to press the Justice Department to bring the
charges.
Sharpton did not say which cities are involved in the protests planned
for this weekend.
Meanwhile a tell-all book by Juror B37 — one of six unnamed women who
acquitted Zimmerman — is off the table following an outcry that she
was trying to profit from the trial and its controversial conclusion.
The anonymous juror had announced Monday through a literary agent that
she hoped to write the book that would give a behind-the-scenes look
at the trial.
The plan was scuttled after the juror gave an interview to CNN's
Anderson Cooper in which she sympathized with Zimmerman, saying his
"heart was in the right place."
"Now that I am returned to my family and to society in general, I have
realized that the best direction for me to go is away from writing any
sort of book and return instead to my life as it was before I was
called to sit on this jury," the juror said in a statement Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, authorities remained on guard for further
rowdy protests after about 150 people split off from a demonstration
Monday night and ran through the streets, committing vandalism and
assaults and stopping traffic. Fourteen people were arrested.
With News Wire Services

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Mandela granddaughter expresses hurt at family dispute

Mandela granddaughter expresses hurt at family dispute
A granddaughter of Nelson Mandela, who remains seriously ill in a
Pretoria hospital, has said she is hurt by a continuing family feud.

Family members have been in dispute over the reburial of the bodies of
three of Mr Mandela's children.

Ndileka Mandela was speaking to the BBC on the eve of Mr Mandela's
95th birthday.

She also described how difficult it had been for the family to cope
with his critical illness.

The dispute has pitted 16 members of the Mandela family, including his
wife Graca Machel, and local chiefs against Mr Mandela's eldest
grandson and traditional chief, Mandla.

They went to the Mthatha High Court on 3 July to force the remains of
three of Mr Mandela's children to be exhumed and returned to his home
in Qunu, in Eastern Cape province.

Mandla had moved them two years ago to his homestead in Mvezo, 22km
(14 miles) from Qunu, apparently without consulting the rest of the
family and elders of the AbaThembu royal house, of which Mr Mandela is
a member.
An affidavit filed with the court alleged that Mandla had relocated
the graves to ensure that Nelson Mandela would be buried in Mvezo.

The remains, now reburied in Qunu, are of Makgatho Mandela, Mandla's
father who died from Aids-related diseases in 2005; Thembekile, who
was killed in a car accident in 1969 and was the father of Ndileka
Mandela; and Makaziwe, Nelson Mandela's first daughter who died when
she was nine months old.

Ndileka Mandela said the argument over the graves was unfortunate but
would not split the family as "blood is thicker than water".
"It was something that we did not want to take in the public space but
because of who we are it was, it did spill over to the public space,"
she said.

"There is no way that I can never forgive but it's just that right now
I'm still hurting."

Ndileka Mandela, an intensive care nurse by training, also complained
at the intrusive nature of media questioning since Mr Mandela was
admitted to hospital with a recurring lung infection on 8 June.

She said relatives had been asked "Is it over with Mr Mandela?" and
"Is he on life support?"

The dispute has become increasingly bitter, with Mandla accusing some
individuals of "jumping on the Mandela bandwagon" and "trying to sow
divisions and destruction" in the family.

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Calif. wildfire destroys 7 homes, threatens more

IDYLLWILD, Calif. (AP) — A wildfire in mountains west of Palm Springs
burned seven homes and led to the evacuation of dozens more, officials
said.

The blaze destroyed three houses, damaged another and destroyed three
mobile homes, a cabin, a garage and about a half-dozen vehicles, the
U.S. Forest Service said in a statement Tuesday.

The wildfire started Monday between Palm Springs and Hemet, near the
rural Riverside County community of Mountain Center, and a day later
had surged to about 14 square miles.

More than 2,200 firefighters and 25 aircraft had the blaze 10 percent contained.

It was mostly moving east toward the desert and away from small
communities of homes, summer cabins and ranches in the San Jacinto
mountains. But a shift in the wind could easily sweep it back toward
homes, authorities said.

"It's a rapidly changing animal," Forest Service spokesman Lee Beyer said.

Most of the damage occurred late Monday and early Tuesday as the fire
more than doubled in size, but it was not assessed until later in the
day.

"Honestly, we thought that the structure destruction was greater than
it is," Forest Service spokesman John Miller said.

Miller said officials were especially surprised that the Zen Mountain
Center survived, and credited firefighters.

"We really thought it was gone," Miller told the Riverside
Press-Enterprise. "The crews hung on and saved it."

About 50 homes were evacuated along with Camp Ronald McDonald, which
hosts programs for children with cancer and their families.

The fire also led authorities to close a pair of state highways and
the Pacific Crest Trail.

A public pool about 20 miles away in Indio was closed because of ash
falling on the water.

The fire raged in thick brush and trees at an elevation of 5,000 to
7,500 feet, sending flames 100 feet high. Some of the area had not
burned in 35 years and the vegetation was dried out, Beyer said.

"We only had 40 to 50 percent of normal precipitation" over the winter
and no rain at all since early April, he said.

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