Looks like a heated argument…
The black and white cat
is showing off a cobra trick!
And the white one has a tail
to show off too!
The white cat says,
“Go a way, I am not afraid of you!”

By JOVANA GEC and AIDA CERKEZ
Associated Press, May 17, 2014

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Record flooding in the Balkans has left least 20 people dead in Serbia and Bosnia and is forcing tens of thousands to flee their homes, authorities said Saturday.

Meteorologists say the flooding is the worst since records began 120 years ago and is due to a three-month amount of rain that fell on the region in just three days. Goran Mihajlovic from Serbia’s Weather Center told The Associated Press that such rainfall happens once in 100 years.

In the eastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina, some 10,000 people were being evacuated Saturday after the rain-swollen Sava River surged through flood defenses.

Officials in Bosnia say 12 people died and more bodies could emerge as the water recedes from dozens of cities flooded in the past three days. In some places, the water had reached the second floor of people’s homes and they had to be rescued by helicopter from their roofs.

Caption: A dog stands in a flooded street in the town of Obrenovac, east from Belgrade, May 16, 2014. The heaviest rains and floods in 120 years have hit Bosnia and Serbia, killing five people, forcing hundreds out of their homes and cutting off entire towns. REUTERS/Marko Djurica (SERBIA – Tags: DISASTER ENVIRONMENT ANIMALS)

In Serbia, which saw eight deaths, emergency crews and soldiers were using boats and helicopters to rescue thousands trapped in the town of Obrenovac, near Belgrade. The overflowing waters there are now threatening Serbia’s biggest power plant.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic told a press conference that a new flood wave on the Sava River will hit Sunday evening.

Thousands of volunteers have responded to government’s appeal to help build up flood defenses around the towns along the Sava.

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Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet
and the winds long to play with your hair. ~Kahlil Gibran

The Flextronics plant that will be building the new Motorola  smartphone”Moto X” is pictured in Fort Worth, Texas  September 10, 2013. REUTERS/Mike Stone

By Dan Levine, Reuters, May 16, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc and Google Inc’s Motorola Mobility unit have agreed to settle all patent litigation between them over smartphone technology, ending one of the highest profile lawsuits in technology.

In a joint statement on Friday, the companies said the settlement does not include a cross license to their respective patents.

“Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform,” the statement said.

Apple and companies that make phones using Google’s Android software have filed dozens of such lawsuits against each other around the world to protect their technology. Apple argued that Android phones that use Google software copy its iPhones.

The two companies informed a federal appeals court in Washington that the cases should be dismissed, according to filings on Friday. However, the deal does not appear to apply to Apple’s litigation against Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, as no dismissal notices were filed in those cases.

The most high-profile case between Apple and Motorola began in 2010. Motorola accused Apple of infringing several patents, including one essential to how cell phones operate on a 3G network, while Apple said Motorola violated its patents to certain smartphone features.

The Apple logo is pictured on the front of the company’s flagship retail store near signs for the central subway project in San Francisco, California January 23, 2013. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

The cases were consolidated in a Chicago federal court. However, Judge Richard Posner dismissed it in 2012 shortly before trial, saying neither company had sufficient evidence to prove its case.

Last month, the appeals court gave the iPhone manufacturer another chance to win a sales ban against its competitor.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2012 for $12.5 billion, and this year announced was selling Motorola Mobility’s handset business to Lenovo, while keeping the vast majority of the patents.

(Reporting by Dan Levine. Editing by Andre Grenon)

By MOHAMMED SAEED and HAMZA HENDAWI
Associated Press, May 16, 2014

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — A pregnant Sudanese woman who married a Christian man was sentenced to death Thursday after she refused to recant her Christian faith, her lawyer said.

Meriam Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but mother was an Orthodox Christian from Ethiopia, was convicted of “apostasy” on Sunday and given four days to repent and escape death, said lawyer Al-Shareef Ali al-Shareef Mohammed.

The 26 year old, who is eight months pregnant, was sentenced after that grace period expired, Mohammed said.

Amnesty International immediately condemned the sentence, calling it “abhorrent.” The U.S. State Department said it was “deeply disturbed” by the sentencing and called on the government to respect the right to freedom of religion.

Christian church-goers pray during Sunday service on January 16, 2011 in Majak, Sudan. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Mohammed, the lawyer, called the conviction rushed and legally flawed since the judge refused to hear key defense witnesses and ignored constitutional provisions on freedom of worship and equality among citizens.

Ibrahim and Wani married in a formal church ceremony in 2011 and have a son, 18-month-old Martin, who is with her in jail. The couple runs several businesses, including a farm, south of Khartoum.

Sudan’s penal code criminalizes the conversion of Muslims into other religions, which is punishable by death.

As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, though Muslim men can marry outside their faith. By law, children must follow their father’s religion.

Sudan introduced Islamic Shariah laws in the early 1980s under the rule of autocrat Jaafar Nimeiri, a move that contributed to the resumption of an insurgency in the mostly animist and Christian south of Sudan. An earlier round of civil war lasted 17 years and ended in 1972. The south seceded in 2011 to become the world’s newest nation, South Sudan.

Sudanese President Omar Bashir, an Islamist who seized power in a 1989 military coup, says his country will implement Islam more strictly now that the non-Muslim south is gone.

A number of Sudanese have been convicted of apostasy in recent years, but they all escaped execution by recanting their new faith. Religious thinker and politician Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, a critic of Nimeiri and his interpretation of Shariah, was sentenced to death after his conviction of apostasy. He was executed in 1985 at the age of 76.

Mohammed said he intends to appeal Ibrahim’s conviction.

“The judge has exceeded his mandate when he ruled that Meriam’s marriage was void because her husband was out of her faith,” Mohammed told The Associated Press. “He was thinking more of Islamic Shariah laws than of the country’s laws and its constitution.”

He said Ibrahim’s Muslim father left her mother when she was a child and her mother raised her as a Christian.

The court in the capital, Khartoum, also ordered that Ibrahim be given 100 lashes for having what it considers sexual relations with her husband, Daniel Wani, a Christian from southern Sudan who has U.S. citizenship, according to the lawyer and judicial officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. Wani was acquitted of a charge of harboring an apostate, according to another defense lawyer, Eman Abdul-Rahim.

Wani fled to the United States as a child to escape the civil war in southern Sudan but later returned, she said.

Amnesty called the sentence a “flagrant breach of international human rights law.”

“The fact that a woman could be sentenced to death for her religious choice, and to flogging for being married to a man of an allegedly different religion, is abhorrent and should never be even considered,” Amnesty said in a statement, quoting its Sudan researcher, Manar Idriss.

Ibrahim’s case first came to the attention of authorities in August, when members of her father’s family complained that she was born a Muslim but married a Christian man.

They claimed that her birth name was “Afdal” and that she changed it to Meriam. Mohammed said the document produced by relatives to show she was given a Muslim name at birth was a fake. Ibrahim refused to answer Judge Abbas Khalifa when he called her “Afdal” during Thursday’s hearing. Meriam is a common name for Muslims and Christians alike.

“I was never a Muslim. I was raised a Christian from the start,” she said.

Authorities first charged her with having illegitimate sex last year but she remained free pending trial. She was charged with apostasy and jailed in February after she declared in court that Christianity was the only religion she knew.

___

Hendawi reported from Cairo.

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