Hasta La Gadget!

By David Ingram

WASHINGTON, Oct 15 (Reuters) – U.S. tobacco companies told a federal judge on Monday they should not be required to tell the public they manipulated nicotine levels to make cigarettes more addictive, or that they repeatedly lied about the health effects of light cigarettes.

The companies – including Altria Group Inc and Reynolds American Inc – have been fighting with the U.S. Justice Department for six years about the wording of what are known as “corrective statements.”

The statements are part of the penalty the companies must pay after U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, in a historic 2006 decision, found that the tobacco industry engaged in a multi-decade fraud to deceive the public.

Labels with the statements are set to run eventually in newspapers, on cigarette packaging and elsewhere.

The labels are separate from those that have run on U.S. cigarette packaging for decades, and from new graphic labels proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Although Kessler’s decision concluded that the companies manipulated nicotine and lied about health effects – and an appeals court upheld her decision – the companies maintain they did nothing wrong.

To force the companies to advertise those conclusions would mean spreading a message they do not believe, in violation of their speech rights, Noel Francisco, a lawyer for several companies, said at a hearing on Monday.

“Simply because the court found it, doesn’t mean it can force us to say it,” Francisco told Kessler. The statements need to be purely factual and non-controversial, he said.

A Justice Department lawyer said the proposed statements are factual, based on Kessler’s 2006 decision, and that the public needs to be aware of the extent of the companies’ lying.

“The tobacco companies would love these statements to be generic health warnings. They would love these statements to be about their products and not about them,” said the Justice Department’s Daniel Crane-Hirsch.

Kessler said she would rule on the proposed wording of the “corrective statements” soon.

The dispute is the latest round in a legal fight between the government and major cigarette-makers dating to the Clinton administration.

In 1999 Justice Department lawyers accused the companies of running a fraud against Americans by denying or downplaying the effects of their products.

One 1954 newspaper ad, for example, dismissed experiments suggesting a link between cancer and smoking. “We accept an interest in people’s health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business,” the ad said.

Kessler ruled that the companies violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a 1970 law designed for use against organized crime.

She rejected a Justice Department proposal that the companies pay billions for anti-smoking campaigns, but she did bar them from using terms such as “low tar” or “light” in their cigarette marketing, and she required them to make corrective statements to the public.

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If you’re looking for a solid Android gaming platform, you may already have one in your hands right now, but a startup company called PlayMG is looking to take Android gaming to the next level with what they claim to be the first-ever dedicated, pocketable WiFi-enabled Android gaming system called the MG.

Essentially, the MG is just another Android device, but it’s specifically built with only gaming in mind. The device comes with 4GB of built-in storage, but the microSD card slot can easily bump that up to as much as 68GB (with a 64GB microSD card). That’s enough to store a lot of Android games.

The device itself has a 4-inch touchscreen with Gorilla Glass, runs on a 1GHz processor with 1GB of RAM, and comes with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. It also has a 1.3MP front-facing camera for facial recognition features. Of course, it has a headphone jack that sits off to the side of the device, which may seems like an odd place, but a lot of games are in landscape mode, so having the headphone jack on the side (on the bottom in landscape mode) is actually quite optimal.

It’s also claimed to be way lighter than other Android devices, since it doesn’t have all of the added features of a normal Android smartphone. The MG also has full access to the Google Play store, so you’ll be able to download and play the same games just like on other Android device. You can get the MG for a special pre-sale price of $149 now through November 4. After that, the device will sell for $169 at Amazon and PlayMG.com.

PlayMG announces the MG, the first-ever dedicated Android gaming device is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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At the local level, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie appears to have more stock in GOP Senate candidate Joe Kyrillos than GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

Christie spent Monday evening campaigning for Kyrillos in West Windsor, N.J., hoping to even out a U.S. Senate race that has polls showing a lopsided advantage for incumbent Democrat Robert Menendez. Those figures aside, the governor expressed no reserve, telling the Newark Star-Ledger that Kyrillos is “going to win.”

When asked why he’s securely behind that notion, Christie injected Romney’s name into the equation.

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Good going, Victoria’s Secret.
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Recent polling conducted by the Pew Research Center suggests that a greater number of people in the U.S. are accepting the reality of climate change. 67 percent of Americans said that there is “solid evidence” that average global temperatures have been rising in recent decades, signaling a gain of four points since last year and 10 points since 2009. Yet only 42 percent say this warming is “mostly caused by human activity,” according to Pew.

In a presidential election marked by accusations of “climate silence” and a lack of forthright discussion of what has been called a “planetary emergency,” the Pew polling reveals another stark difference between supporters of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Only 42 percent of Romney supporters say there is strong evidence of global warming and a paltry 18 percent acknowledge its human origin. This 42 percent stands in sharp contrast to the 88 percent of Obama supporters who say that average global temperatures are on the rise and 63 percent who say it is anthropogenic.

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