Hasta La Gadget!

LOUISE WATT, Associated Press

HONG KONG (AP) — Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong set a Wednesday deadline for a response from the government to meet their demands for reforms after spending another night blocking streets in an unprecedented show of civil disobedience.

A brief statement from the Occupy Central civil disobedience movement said it had set an Oct. 1 deadline for the city’s unpopular Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying to meet their demands for genuine democracy and for him to step down as leader of Hong Kong.

It said they would “announce new civil disobedience plans same day.”

Wednesday is a holiday for China’s National Day, and even larger crowds are expected to flood the streets. The government said it was canceling a fireworks display planned to celebrate the National Day.

One day after police shocked the city by firing tear gas at the crowds, the protesters passed a peaceful night Monday singing as the blocked streets in several parts of Hong Kong. They also staged a brief “mobile light” vigil, waving their glowing cell phones as the protests stretched into their fourth day. Crowds chanted calls for Leung to resign, and sang anthems calling for freedom.

“The students are protecting the right to vote, for Hong Kong’s future. We are not scared, we are not frightened, we just fight for it,” said Carol Chan, a 55-year-old civil service worker who took two days off to join the protests after becoming angered over police use of tear gas Sunday.

Students and activists have been camped out since late Friday, demanding that Beijing grant democratic reforms to the former British colony.

Police said they used 87 rounds of tear gas Sunday in what they called a necessary but restrained response to protesters pushing through cordons and barricades. They said 41 people were injured, including 12 police officers.

“Police cordon lines were heavily charged, by some violent protesters. So police had to use the minimum force in order to separate the distance at that moment between the protesters and also the police,” said Cheung Tak-keung, the assistant police commissioner for operations.

The atmosphere was more festive Monday as constantly shifting crowds blocked major roads. People moved in and out of the sit-ins, some bringing in food and drink while others fetched their own. Some high school students, still in their school uniforms, sat on the pavement doing their homework.

“It’s already the fourth day, so it’s really tiring,” said Ching-ching Tse, a 24-year-old student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who was on her second day of collecting trash in the protest area with her friends. “So we are forming some groups and hope we can do some shifts and take turns.”

Officials announced that schools in some districts of Hong Kong would remain closed Tuesday because of safety concerns, while dozens of bus routes were canceled and some subway stops near protest areas were closed.

The protests have been dubbed the “Umbrella Revolution” by some, because the crowds have used umbrellas to not only block the sun, but also to stop the police from hitting them with pepper spray. Political slogans calling for freedom have also been written on the umbrellas.

Many younger Hong Kong residents raised in an era of plenty and with no experience of past political turmoil in mainland China have higher expectations. Under an agreement set in 1984, before most of them were born, Beijing promised to allow Hong Kong residents civil liberties — unseen in the rest of China — after it took control of the city of 7.1 million in 1997.

The protesters are dismayed by China’s decision last month that candidates in the city’s first-ever election for its top leader must be hand-picked by a committee of mostly pro-Beijing tycoons. That move is viewed by many residents as reneging on promises to allow greater democracy in the semi-autonomous territory, since Beijing had promised that the chief executive would eventually be chosen through “universal suffrage.”

China’s communist leaders take a hard line against any threat to their monopoly on power, including clamping down on dissidents and Muslim Uighur separatists in the country’s far west, but it cannot crack down too harshly on the semi-autonomous territory where a freewheeling media ensures global visibility.

Across the border, Chinese state media have provided scant coverage of the protests beyond noting that an illegal gathering spun out of control and was being curtailed by police.

The protests began a week ago with a class boycott by university and college students demanding reforms of the local legislature and a withdrawal of Beijing’s requirement that election candidates be screened.

Leaders of the broader Occupy Central civil disobedience movement joined the protesters early Sunday, saying they wanted to kick-start a long-threatened mass sit-in demanding Hong Kong’s top leader be elected without Beijing’s interference.

“People are feeling a kind of guilt that they were allowing the young kids in their late teens and early 20s to take all the risks, so people are coming out to support them,” said Steve Tsang, a senior fellow at the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute.

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Associated Press writers Elaine Kurtenbach, Kelvin Chan and Joanna Chiu contributed to this report.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, who helped oversee last month’s aggressive response to protests in Ferguson, Missouri, said Monday that communications failures led police to lock up peaceful citizens during daytime hours.

Belmar testified in federal court about the so-called five-second rule that police in Ferguson allowed protestors before enforcing Missouri’s law against refusing to disperse. Though the statute only applies to individuals who refuse a police order to leave an “unlawful assembly, or at the scene of a riot,” police in Ferguson repeatedly demanded crowds disperse during protests last month of a police officer’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown, 18, who was unarmed.

Police applied the rule to everyone, from protesters and journalists, to children and a 73-year-old woman. Even during daylight hours, officers arrested people who stopped moving for a few seconds, and threatened those who didn’t keep in motion. The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri is suing both St. Louis County and St. Louis Highway Patrol over the enforcement of the law on behalf of protesters, seeking an injunction forbidding police from arresting protestors who are standing still.

Belmar testified that the five-second rule was only supposed to be applied at night. Yet the rule was enforced during daylight. Even a news photographer was arrested during a peaceful daytime protest, apparently because he stopped on the sidewalk to take photos and wasn’t inside the designated media area.

Belmar said the “keep moving” instructions were applied by mistake by officers. He said there had been a breakdown in communication.

“I don’t think we were clear enough as commanders,” Belmar testified, according to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Some instructions, he said, “confused” the officers. “We understand that now, but I didn’t understand it then,” he said.

ACLU attorney Grant Davis-Denny testified that the rule was so inconsistently enforced that it was unconstitutional, according to St. Louis Public Radio.

“It gives citizens absolutely no idea when their activity is lawful or unlawful. It also gives police officers way too much discretion,” Davis-Denny testified, according to the report. “And it’s particularly problematic that all this occurs in a place where people are exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Protester Johnetta Elzie said that she testified about how she felt when she was out on the street in Ferguson.

“I told him I’m afraid for my life, basically, because at any given moment I could be snatched away,” Elzie told The Huffington Post of her testimony.

DeRay McKesson, another protester who testified, said he talked about how the rule was was inconsistently enforced.

“It depended on where you stood on West Florissant. Some people were like ‘You gotta keep moving,’ some people didn’t care,” McKesson said.

A federal judge is likely to rule on the ACLU’s request for a permanent injunction sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Eight people were arrested outside the Ferguson police department on Sunday night following the weekend shooting of a police officer. Tensions heated up late Monday as well.

Though this animation bit is made by Mercedes Benz and probably goes through a little revisionist history on who invented the van (Benz says it was Benz), it’s still a cute take on the history of such an important vehicle in the history of mankind. Yes, the van was and still is important.

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There has been a fair amount of buzz surrounding the upcoming Google Nexus X for quite some time now (which is also known as the Nexus 6 just in case you were wondering), so much so that plenty of ground concerning the device has already been covered. For instance, it is widely speculated that the final iteration of the Nexus X will arrive with a 5.9” display at QHD (2560 x 1440 pixels resolution, in addition to a Snapdragon 805 processor, a 13-megapixel camera at the back with a 2-megapixel shooter in front, alongside the next version of the Android operating system. In a nutshell, the Nexus X seems set to be a natural evolution of the Moto X from Motorola. However, it seems that there is more to it – the rear camera will apparently arrive with optical image stabilization (OIS) capability, while its battery will sport a 3,200mAh capacity.

The two grills that are located on the front of the Nexus X happens to be stereo speakers as well, and the final name has yet to be decided. Well, the home screen of the handset is also pretty interesting to take note of – you can see from the above that apart from the standard slew of Google apps, the there is also a Drive folder located near the Google folder, which will carry the Drive app in addition to companion Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps.

Not only that, there is also a Play folder that looks set to carry the likes of Play Music, Books, Movies & TV, and Newsstand.

More Nexus X Details Surface

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I am quite sure that based on the title of this story alone, you would know for sure that it is not going to be the Nokia 3310 that will bend, as this is one hardy handset that has its fair share of memes dedicated to the overall toughness of the device. In fact, it is also widely recognized to be one of the sturdiest phones that ever rolled off a phone production line, so it is nice to see something this classic make a case for itself. I would like to add, too, that the Motorola Microtac was definitely unbendable no matter how much pressure you applied to it with your hands, regardless of the angle. Heck, I suppose one of the “features” of that handset would it being a self defense weapon that could knock the lights out of someone if used correctly.

Do you think that pitting the Nokia 3310 against the iPhone 6 Plus or other newer handsets in terms of a bending test is fair in the first place? Well, Consumer Reports have already reported that the #bendgate affair has been “overblown“, and they might have a point, but taking into consideration that other handsets from different manufacturers do not experience this – not even just 9 official cases reported, it ought to be something that Apple should look into.

Nokia 3310 Bend Test

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