Hasta La Gadget!

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria, June 30 (Reuters) – Nigerian troops have arrested a businessman suspected of being at the head of a Boko Haram intelligence network that helped plan the abduction of more than 200 school girls in the northeast, the military said on Tuesday.

The man had helped the Islamist militant group plan several attacks, including the killing of traditional ruler the Emir of Gwoza, it said in a statement.

Two women were also arrested as part of the investigation, one of whom was accused of coordinating payments to other “operatives”.

A year old intensive military operation against Boko Haram has so far failed to crush the rebels, whose struggle for an Islamic state in largely Muslim northern Nigeria has killed thousands since it was launched in 2009.

The insurgency has destabilized much of the northeast of Africa’s top oil producer and biggest economy.

The abduction in mid-April of 276 school girls, 219 of which remain in captivity, has become a symbol of the government’s powerlessness to protect civilians from attack.

Defense spokesman Major-General Chris Olukolade said in a statement that the arrested man used his membership of a pro-government vigilante group “as a cover, while remaining an active terrorist”.

Olukolade said the man had coordinated several deadly attacks in Maiduguri since 2011, including on customs and military locations as well as the planting improvised bombs.

Violence has been relentless in northeast Nigeria in particular, with hundreds killed in the past two months. There have also been bombings blamed on the militant group in the capital Abuja.

On Sunday, the Chibok community was attacked again in three places. Militants opened fire on churches and homes, killing dozens and burning houses to the ground. (Reporting by Lanre Ola Additional reporting by Camillus Eboh in Abuja; Writing by Tim Cocks Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Sony sold off its PC business earlier this year , but like a phoenix, Vaio is rising from the flames. And, err, it looks quite a lot like it did before .

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BAGHDAD (AP) — Violence has claimed the lives of 2,417 Iraqis in June, making it the deadliest month so far this year, the United Nations said on Tuesday, underlining the daunting challenge the government faces as it struggles to confront Islamic extremists who have seized large swaths of territory in the north and west.

In recent weeks, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have spearheaded a lightning offensive across Iraq, plunging it into its deepest crisis since the last U.S. troops left in 2011. The al-Qaida breakaway group now controls territory stretching from northern Syria as far as the outskirts of Baghdad in central Iraq.

The figures issued by the U.N. mission to Iraq put last month’s civilian death toll at 1,531, with 886 security forces killed. UNAMI added that 2,287 Iraqis, including 1,763 civilians, were wounded.

The figures exclude deaths in embattled Anbar province, which is largely controlled by Sunni militants.

The second deadliest month this year was May, with 799 Iraqis killed, including 603 civilians. April’s death toll was 750.

The latest casualty figures exceed even last year’s peak. The U.N. reported that last July at least 1,057 Iraqis were killed and another 2,326 were wounded.

“The staggering number of civilian casualties in one month points to the urgent need for all to ensure that civilians are protected,” the U.N. Special Representative in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said in the statement.

Mladenov called on Iraqi political rivals to “work together to foil attempts to destroy the social fabric of Iraqi society.”

Iraq’s new parliament holds its inaugural session Tuesday. The country’s top Shiite cleric urged lawmakers last week to agree on a prime minister before meeting in hopes of averting months of wrangling that could further destabilize the country.

The Islamic State meanwhile announced the establishment of its own government, or caliphate, ruled by Islamic law. It proclaimed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a highly ambitious Iraqi militant with a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head, to be the caliph, and it demanded that Muslims around the world pledge allegiance to him.

Through brute force and meticulous planning, the Sunni extremist group — which said it was changing its name to simply the Islamic State, dropping the reference to Iraq and the Levant — has managed to effectively erase the Syria-Iraq border and lay the foundations of its proto-state. Along the way, it has battled Syrian rebels, Kurdish militias and the Syrian and Iraqi militaries.

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Two thousand feet belowground, men covered in soot noted a wailing rumble in the distance’the sound of many tons of rock falling in caverns deep inside the mountain. “The mine is weeping,” they said to one another.

For the last year or so, Samsung has been touting a “paradigm shift” in the way it constructs flash memory: from a horizontal to a vertical arrangement of cells, or what it calls 3D V-NAND. Now, judging from reviews of the first V-NAND consumer SSDs,…