In brief: Steve Jobs’ video testimony transfixes jury
OAKLAND, California – More than three years after his death, legendary Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs held a federal courtroom transfixed Friday as a video of his testimony was shown in a class-action lawsuit that accuses Apple of inflating prices by locking music lovers into using Apple’s iPod players.
Looking gaunt and pale, Jobs spoke softly during the deposition he gave six months before his death in October 2011. But he gave a firm defense of Apple’s software, which blocked music from services that competed with Apple’s iTunes store.
“We were very scared” of the prospect that hackers could break Apple’s security system, Jobs said, because that might jeopardize Apple’s contracts with music companies that didn’t want their songs to be pirated.
But Jobs didn’t seem cowed by record labels in an email, read by an attorney for the plaintiffs, in which the Apple CEO demanded that a record executive publicly apologize for praising rival RealNetworks for producing software that would make songs from the RealNetworks store play on Apple’s iPods.
Jurors saw the video on the fourth day of the trial.
China arrests former security official
BEIJING – Chinese authorities placed the feared ex-security chief Zhou Yongkang under formal arrest early today to investigate his suspected crimes, including accepting bribes, adultery and leaking national secrets, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Zhou, a former member of the powerful nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, also was expelled from the Communist Party, making him the most senior figure to be snared in President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown.
Zhou is the highest-level official to be prosecuted since the 1981 treason trial of Mao Zedong’s wife and others who persecuted political opponents during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
He had been under investigation for “severe disciplinary violations” – a phrase that is usually used to describe corruption – since July and presumably had been detained by party investigators months earlier. He had not been seen publicly since October 2013.