Last month, Apple launched a patent-infringement suit against HTC, the Taiwanese company whose phones run Google’s Android operating system. The Times’ piece neatly illuminates the two companies’ conflicting approaches to mobile development – the one a ferociously-policed walled-garden, the other a freewheelin’ realm of non-proprietary apps; and catalogues with horrified glee the perceived slights and small betrayals which litter the landscape in which the two tech titans now duke it out. Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams.

Though the company was quick to announce that the fifteen-year-olds were no longer employed (or were, at least, no longer underage), it was grim news for the company: earlier in the week it had emerged that 62 Chinese factory-workers had been contaminated (fatally, in one case) by the banned chemical n-hexane, which can damage eyesight and cause muscular degeneration - prompting the kind of ‘poison apple’ headlines which must long have stalked its PR dept’s nightmares. Meanwhile a commotion kicked off over the watering-down of Apple’s sauce : last week many apps containing

He was referring to the reduction of Greece’s credit rating by three non-accountable private companies and the subsequent market speculation on Greek bonds financing the deficit, which led interest rates on sovereign borrowing to rise 4% above baseline. By the fall of 2004, three years after a record default on a debt of more than $100 billion, the country was well on the road to recovery; and it achieved this feat without foreign help. Below is a first excerpt from a very important, crucial editorial by Costas Douzinas in the Guardian, which calls for resistance against EU/IMF imposed policies which have already a record of destroying many economies.