By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; 5:40 PM

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) pleaded not guilty this afternoon to charges of making false statements about more than $250,000 in renovations to his Anchorage-area home and other gifts he received from executives of an oil services company.

At Stevens's arraignment in U.S. District Court, the senator's attorneys and prosecutors agreed they could start a trial by late September, just a month before the 84-year-old senator could face a tough battle in the November election. After a 30-minute recess to consider Stevens's request, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan set a Sept. 24 trial date.

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; 10:09 AM

The brothers behind the popular Facebook application Scrabulous have returned with a new word puzzle game, only two days after they took down their Scrabble-like game in the wake of a lawsuit filed against them by board-game maker Hasbro.

The free game had been one of the most popular applications on the social-networking site, and many fans who turned to the game for a dose of procrastination each day griped loudly online when it disappeared. Hasbro had complained that Scrabulous infringed on its copyright.

Jason Kincaid
TechCrunch.com
Wednesday, July 30, 2008; 2:24 PM

It was only a matter of time. Cuil, the "massive" new search engine that was supposed to be able to keep up with Google, has just gotten its first knockoff. It's Yuil, a Yahoo-powered mashup that looks almost exactly like Cuil. And, oddly enough, Yuil might actually work better than its much-hyped predecessor.

By Juliet Eilperin and Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 31, 2008; A01

KANSAS CITY, Mo., July 30 -- Sen. John McCain last week delivered one of his sharpest critiques yet of Sen. Barack Obama's Iraq policies, carefully reading a prepared speech that accused his Democratic rival of failing the commander-in-chief test and promoting ideas that would force American troops to "retreat under fire."

But just hours after his crisp performance, the Republican presidential candidate blurred his own message with an offhand comment to a television interviewer that Obama's proposal for a 16-month time frame for removing combat troops from Iraq might be a "pretty good timetable." That seemed to run counter to his attempts to cast Obama as naive on foreign policy, and it sent his aides scrambling.

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; A01

ANCHORAGE, July 30 -- Alaska's vast landscape is littered with federally funded tributes to Sen. Ted Stevens's single-minded promotion of the state, from the brushed steel of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport to the $187 million that subsidizes air mail for the one-third of residents who live beyond the reach of roads.

In his almost 40 years in the Senate, the octogenarian Republican in many ways defined the shape of the Last Frontier, not least by using his perch on the Appropriations Committee to ensure that his state's tiny population remained the nation's richest in federal spending per capita. More than $9 billion arrived in Alaska from Washington in 2006, twice as much as a decade earlier.

For car-leasing addicts accustomed to climbing into a new car every few years, the party may be ending, at least for customers of Detroit's Big Three auto makers.

Chrysler LLC's finance arm last week decided to get out of the auto-lease business. Now, General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. are signaling that they're paring leasing at their captive finance companies. As a result, many Americans will have to change their car-shopping habits.

FCC.politics.gov
July 30, 2008; Page A14

Bad personnel decisions have haunted the Bush Administration, and one of the bigger disappointments is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin. In his last months as Master of the Media Universe, he seems poised to expand government regulation of the Internet.

The FCC is by all accounts planning this week to uphold a complaint against Comcast, the cable company accused of throttling attempts to trade movies and other high-bandwidth files on its network that slow down Internet service for everyone else. Comcast has maintained that its "terms of service" agreement allowed such network-management. In any case, earlier this year the cable company reached an agreement with BitTorrent, the popular file-sharing service being used on Comcast's network, and settled the matter. Or so we thought.

Barack's European Vacation
July 30, 2008; Page A13

As I watched the right pour out its rain of fury on Barack Obama after his Berlin speech I couldn't help but think of poor old Wile E. Coyote, raging impotently as the Road Runner zips through one of his carefully prepared snares.

Over the years conservatives have invested considerable capital, and enjoyed considerable success, in making "old Europe" a veritable synonym for all that is effete and snobbish and Chablis-drinking and just plain alien about liberalism. "Europe" was a bit of symbolism they thought they had tarnished beyond redemption; a well they had poisoned for good.

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 30, 2008; D01

A majority of the Federal Communications Commission has concluded that cable operator Comcast unlawfully disrupted the transfer of certain digital video files, affirming the government's right to regulate how Internet companies manage Web traffic.

Three commissioners on the five-member FCC have signed off on an order that finds Comcast violated federal rules by purposely slowing the transmission of video files shared among users of the application BitTorrent.

James Quintana Pearce
paidContent.org
Tuesday, July 29, 2008; 12:07 PM

Updated: Facebook says the decision to block Scrabulous for U.S. and Canadian users was made by the Scrabulous developers, not Facebook. The social net forwarded the DMCA notice to the Calcutta brothers, who took the app down on their end. Facebook spokesperson said that that it isn't taking sides in the Scrabulous-Hasbro dispute.

Original post: Hasbro's lawsuit has shut down the popular Facebook Scrabble application Scrabulous, at least for US and Canada users. "If you try to pull up the popular game, you get the following message: 'Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here." If you click, you get a form from the Scrabulous founders asking for your e-mail address so they can keep you posted on further developments,'" reports NYT. Here in Mexico Scrabulous is working, and my Australian friends are still listed in the games. Which brings us to the crux of the issue, which is an old, complicated rights ownership crashing into a global online media. Hasbro, which started the lawsuit, only owns the rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada?Mattel owns the rights to the rest of the world.