Attorney General Kamala D. Harris of California said on Wednesday she reached an agreement with six major companies to provide consumers with greater privacy disclosures.Her agreement with the six largest companies in the mobile device market - Amazon, Apple, Google , Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Hewlett-Packard - bound the companies, as well as developers on their popular platforms, to disclose how they use private user data before an app may be downloaded, Harris said. Read More

Foreign correspondent Marie Colvin, an American who long worked for the British press, and Remi Ochlik, a French photographer, were killed in Homs, Syria on Wednesday by a mortar attack.French officials have confirmed the deaths, which resulted from  a governmental bombardment of Homs. That city, the third largest in Syria, has been one of the centers of the civic unrest gripping Syria.While the United Nations has ceased counting the death toll, Local Coordination Committees, a Syrian activist group, has said more than 20 people were killed. Read More

Women, especially younger women, are more likely than men to show up at the hospital with no chest pain or discomfort after having a heart attack -- and they are also more likely to die than men of the same age, according to a U.S. study.That lack of symptoms can result in delayed medical care and differences in treatment, said researchers, whose findings appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association."They might not even know they're having a heart attack," said John Canto, from the Watson Clinic in Lakeland, Florida, who worked on the report. Read More

A sharply divided high court of the U.S. Presbyterian Church on Tuesday upheld the ecclesiastical rebuke levied against a lesbian minister for performing same-sex weddings in California.The decision affirming the censure of the Rev. Jane Spahr means that Presbyterian ministers continue to face church discipline for following their conscience in treating gay and lesbian couples the same as heterosexuals when it comes to marriage. Read More

The revelations that Google Inc, Twitter and other popular Internet companies have been taking liberties with customer data have prompted criticism from privacy advocates and lawmakers, along with apologies from the companies.They are the latest in a long line of missteps by large Internet companies that have faced little punishment for pushing privacy boundaries, which are already more expansive than most consumers understand. Read More

ESPN has fired one employee and suspended another for using the same racist word in connection to New York Knicks’ guard Jeremy Lin.In both cases, an employee used the word “chink” in reference to Lin, a Palo Alto native of Chinese descent.“We again apologize, especially to Mr. Lin,” ESPN wrote. “His accomplishments are a source of great pride to the Asian-American community, including the Asian-American employees at ESPN. Through self-examination, improved editorial practices and controls, and response to constructive criticism, we will be better in the future.” Read More