Texas Governor Rick Perry Tuesday signed into law a new so-called "shoot first" law, which allows state residents to use deadly force to respond to threats in their homes, cars, and at jobs. The bill, also known as a "stand your ground" law, was approved by large majorities in both houses of the Texas Legislature. In his statement, Perry said "The right to defend oneself from an imminent act of harm should not only be clearly defined in Texas law, but is intuitive to human nature." The legislation, which requires that the person defending themselves be unprovoked, also provides civil immunity for any justified action under the law. The Texas law takes effect September 1, 2007.

Georgia enacted a similar law last July, and Florida adopted a "shoot first" law in 2005. Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and South Dakota all have enacted similar legislation as well. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has continually called such legislation "phenomenally dangerous," but the National Rifle Association maintains that these laws are necessary to protect innocent citizens.

On March 21, the California State University faculty voted overwhelmingly—94 percent—to authorize a strike for increased wages and benefits. The workers, represented by the California Faculty Association, have been working without a contract for over two years.

If a settlement is not reached by an April deadline, a series of two-day rolling strikes up and down the state will happen. 

This would mark the largest university strike in U.S. history with up to 24,000 workers participating.

Faculty pay is the primary sticking point. CSU's faculty members earn salaries much lower than faculty at other universities and even community colleges.

According to a report issued a year ago by the California Postsecondary Education Commission, based on a five-year trend, CSU faculty salaries were estimated to have fallen behind comparable institutions by 18 percent in the 2006-07 academic year. They were 16.8 percent lower than salaries for faculty at similar universities in the 2004-05 academic year.

Prosecutors are investigating the conditions under which some European public tenders were awarded and allegations that civil servants took bribes from real estate and security companies in exchange for contracts to rent and secure the Commission buildings. The investigation was launched three years ago and also involves OLAF, the EU's independent anti-fraud office.

City leaders approved a ban on most plastic grocery bags after weeks of lobbying on both sides from environmentalists and a supermarket trade group.

If Mayor Gavin Newsom signs the ban as expected, San Francisco would be the first U.S. city to adopt such a rule.

The law, passed by a 10-1 vote, requires large markets and drugstores to give customers only a choice among bags made of paper that can be recycled, plastic that breaks down easily enough to be made into compost or reusable cloth.

Perhaps sensing an oncoming attack from the world's new #4 PC manufacturer, Acer, HP reached deep into its patent portfolio yesterday, uncovering five technology methods - including three acquired from Compaq - and filed a lawsuit accusing Acer of utilizing HP technologies covered by those patents without authorization. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages, but more importantly, it requests that a judge block the sale of Acer computers utilizing those technologies, imported from Taiwan.

That could quite possibly include all of Acer's notebook line, since the technology addressed by two of the listed patents (one granted to Compaq pre-merger, one to HP post-merger) concerns processor speed reduction - the capability for a computer to instruct its processor to power down in periods of reduced stress or workload.

Processor "speed stepping," as some call it, is a fairly common feature today in portable computers. But in 2002, Compaq was granted one patent for a method in which processor speed can be stepped down, requiring some kind of a system that measures not just workload but the nature of processor activity. If a CPU appears to be doing the same thing repetitively - what's called a "tight loop" - it's probably just operating the mouse pointer and waiting for user input, a good time to power down.

Compaq's patent and the HP one that followed were careful not to refer to where this monitoring system would be located - for instance, in the BIOS or through an operating system driver. However, since neither company produces CPUs, it made sense to describe the system as independent from the CPU itself.

Clearly, however, if HP did invent this method of power consumption, it did not conceive the original method. Both Intel and AMD have adopted means for their CPUs to power themselves down in low-workload conditions. AMD incorporates such methods today under its "Cool 'n' Quiet" and "PowerNow" monikers; and Intel's SpeedStep technology - which borrows operating system drivers to manage workload - dates back to Windows 95, well before the 2002 issuance date on the Compaq patent.

But even excluding methods proffered by CPU manufacturers, Acer certainly isn't the only non-HP brand to employ power stepping. Apple has utilized it since at least the PowerMac G4 generation. And the fact that multiple methods may exist may go to the heart of whether HP was actually damaged by Acer's choice of methods. HP itself admits to having adopted AMD's Opteron power consumption methods for some servers in 2004.

So at least two of HP's five patents could face a significant challenge once its case comes to court.

While the other three patents in question may pertain to concepts that were original at the time, it may come as a surprise to more manufacturers than Acer that any sort of license from HP may be required to use them. For instance, in 2002, HP was issued a patent for the idea that, when writing data to a DVD+RW disc in multisession mode, subsequent sessions should be able to start writing at a certain fencepost bit where the previous sessions left off. This is in order to avoid frequency gaps caused by multiple sessions written by multiple devices, where a single reading device might not be able to reconcile the shift in one frequency to another in time to "see" the subsequent session.

Also under contention is a 1999 Compaq patent for the ability to segment signals traveling along a single digital bus into groups to facilitate different bus speeds; and a 1995 Compaq patent that was clearly written in the era before multicore processors were even considered. This oldest patent in the bunch is for a method for a BIOS to switch on multiple processors in sequence rather than simultaneously. At the time, the processors were assumed to be separate units; but nowadays, some of the language could very well apply to multicore CPUs, which now comprise a huge majority of sales in all markets.

That fact could play a role in Acer's defense, potentially arguing that, having inevitably foreseen the ubiquity of multicore processors, HP would have to have publicly stated its intention to defend this patent years ago in order for it to do so today. Network chip maker Qualcomm lost a similar argument against rival Broadcom just last week.

HP's suit was filed in federal court in Marshall, Texas, and seeks a jury trial. Marshall, a city of about 25,000, has become known in some quarters as the lawsuit capital of the US, reportedly handling 60% of all antitrust cases filed in the entire Eastern District.

In early March, the New Jersey Superior Court upheld a separate jury verdict that found Merck adequately warned physicians of the risks associated with Vioxx. A week later, a New Jersey jury awarded a plaintiff $20 million and held that Vioxx caused the plaintiff's heart attack and, had the plaintiff's doctor known of the risks associated with Vioxx, he would not have prescribed it to the plaintiff. Merck faces more than 27,000 lawsuits from people who say they were harmed by the once $2.5 billion-a-year drug before it was pulled from the market [press release] in September 2004. Merck has set aside $1 billion to fight every Vioxx court challenge. In November 2006, a federal judge declined to certify a national class action suit, ruling that it made more sense to try the cases in their respective states of origin.

The New Hampshire House of Representatives voted Tuesday to reject proposed legislation which would have effectively ended the death penalty in the state. Had it passed, the proposed law would have set the maximum penalty for capital crimes at life in prison without parole.

he debate was emotionally charged by the recent shooting of a police officer for which his assailant now faces execution. Opponents of the bill said overturning capital punishment so soon after the death of Officer Michael Briggs would be an insult to the state's police officers.

The New Hampshire legislature attempted to repeal the state's death penalty in 2000 and again in 2001, but the first attempt was vetoed by then-Governor Jeanne Shaheen and the second try failed to pass the legislature. Current governor John Lynch has threatened to veto any legislation which would end executions in the state. Eleven US states have recently suspended the death penalty for reconsideration. Most recently, the Montana Senate voted to repeal the practice.