STEVE JOBS DIES AT 56

Camille Kornacki

Steve Jobs, one of Apple Inc.’s co-founders and strongest visionaries has passed away. News of his passing broke the night of October 5. His death is believed to have been from natural causes. Jobs went under the knife for pancreatic cancer in 2004, and received a liver transplant in 2009. Jobs resigned as Apple CEO in August due to health concerns, but remained chairman of the Apple board of directors.

Jobs attended Reed College for less than two semesters before dropping out and went on to become a game designer at a new firm called Atari. Jobs and his older friend Stephen Wozniak would play games while Jobs worked at night. The two worked together to build single-board computers and founded Apple Computer, Inc in 1976. Together with “The Woz,” Jobs lead Apple to become the technological titan it is today. Jobs was also a founder and member of the board of directors of Pixar Animation Studios.

PUTIN PROPOSES EURASIAN UNION

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has hopes of forming a “Eurasian Union” of countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. He says that this would be a way to “integrate” the countries for economic and political purposes. Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have already created an economic alliance.

Putin denies that this is a way to rebuild the Soviet Empire, the destruction of which he has called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS ANNOUNCED

On October 3, the recipients of this year’s Nobel Prizes began to be announced.

The award for chemistry was given to Dan Shectman, of the Israel Institute of Technology, for the discovery of quasicrystals. Shectman’s studies found that the matter in his crystal samples was arranged in a unique, non-repeating pattern. Previously, scientists believed that solid matter could only be composed of regular patterns.

The award for physics was given to Saul Perlmuer, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G Reiss for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae. They discovered that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, meaning that the end of the universe could come when all of the heat in the universe is gone and atoms are frozen in place, a theory known as “heat death.”

The award for physiology or medicine was granted to Bruce A. Beutler, Jules A. Hoffman and Ralph M. Steinman for their discoveries in activating innate immunity and adaptive immunity. They were given the award for discovering how immunity can be “turned on” during the early and late steps of development.

AMANDA KNOX RULING OVERTURNED

There are new developments in the four-year-long legal battle of Amanda Knox. In November 2007, Meredith Kercher was found dead in her apartment in Italy. Her roommate was American exchange student Amanda Knox. Four days later, Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were arrested.

On October 28, 2008, both were indicted on counts of murder and sexual assault. The trial opened in January 2009 and ended that December, when Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison, and Sollecito 25.

Knox’s time in court was not yet over as she found herself back on the stand in November 2010, charged with slander against the police. During her original trial, she had claimed the police had beaten her into giving false testimony. That same month, an appeals trial began for her and Sollecito’s original case. In December 2010, Italy’s highest court upheld the original conviction. However, this summer forensic reports demonstrated the DNA evidence used to convict both Knox and Sollecutio to be unreliable.

October 3, 2011, saw the overruling of the conviction of both Knox and Sollecito. Knox arrived home in Seattle, Washington the next day. Kercher’s family is “disappointed” that the truth of the murder is still unknown.