February 2012

The Pentagon's latest spending plan marks a little-noticed but important shift for the space industry, scaling back a push to use commercial satellites to supplement the military's communication and space efforts. Defense Department budget cutters have long favored leasing satellite capacity in certain cases over developing, building and launching costly dedicated systems. But industry officials say the budget package unveiled this week backs away from that decades-long privatization drive in two key areas: leasing private communication-satellite capacity to provide more bandwidth and buying commercial imagery to augment spy satellites.

Hollywood veteran Brian Robbins is part of a teeming new ecosystem, as some of Hollywood's biggest names—with support from Silicon Valley's deepest pockets—are racing to create new shows, and in some cases, dozens of them, for the Web. A former NBC programming chief is launching three YouTube channels in the coming months. The creator of the CBS juggernaut "CSI" is filming a series of YouTube thrillers. Stars like Tom Hanks and Kevin Spacey are at work on new shows for Yahoo and Netflix. For veterans of movie studios and TV networks, the Web beckons as a creative playground, unhindered by studio control and the threat of swift cancellation. Show creators often own the content they create for the Web, which means they're free to spin off their concepts later for movies or traditional TV shows—and could stand to gain a bigger share of the profits if a project takes off. Perhaps most importantly, no one wants to be left behind in a shift that could represent the future of television.

Auret van Heerden, president of the Fair Labor Association which was hired by Apple to inspect its suppliers’ factories, has begun praising the Chinese plants of Foxconn, Apple’s largest supplier, just days after his group began inspections there. van Heerden’s apparent praise of conditions at Foxconn came despite previous reports of employees committing suicide, dying in factory explosions and complaining of sometimes working more than 70 hours a week.

The Fair Labor Association’s No. 2 official, Jorge Perez-Lopez, said, “The work we’re doing at Foxconn is not about first impressions or whether something has a paint job or not.” “The proof,” Perez-Lopez continued, “will be in the pie, will be in the eating. It will be when the report comes out.” “Generally, in a labor rights investigation, the findings come after the evidence is gathered, not the other way around,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, a university-backed group that monitors apparel factories worldwide. “I’m amazed that the F.L.A. would give one of the most notoriously abusive factories in the world a clean bill of health — based, it appears, on nothing more than a guided tour provided by the owner,” he added. “If the F.L.A. wants to convince people that it can somehow conduct an impartial investigation of Apple, despite being funded by Apple, this is not a good way to start.”

President Obama praised Congress for agreeing to legislation that would extend a payroll tax cut and auction television airwave licenses to wireless companies. He promised to sign the bill as soon as it reaches his desk. "[The legislation] includes a critical element in the plan I outlined in the State of the Union to out-innovate the rest of the world by unleashing mobile broadband, investing in innovation, and building a nationwide public safety network," President Obama said. "It will mean a stronger economy and hundreds of thousands of new jobs."