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Foxconn, most famous as Apple's China-based manufacturer, has set out a stringent list of demands for Brazil to meet before it builds a $12 billion plant there. Rumors swirled for long while that Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai, was considering expanding its existing local business and opening a multi-billion dollar manufacturing facility in Brazil, with firmer data emerging only earlier this year

Protesters have developed a novel way of smuggling information to the outside world: trading in their mobile camera phones for small, discreet pen cameras. While Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria has not been engaging in violence on a Qadaffi-like scale, snipers have reportedly fired on peaceful protesters and civilian casualties were reported in several cities recently.

Osama Bin Laden is dead . At least, that's what we've been told, and I tend to believe such things. But how do they know it's him

The U.S.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act poured $787 billion back into our economy. That spectacular price tag became a centerpiece of the right's campaign against the left leading up to the midterm elections, and prompted the Obama administration to justify the stimulus package's effectiveness as critics tried to paint it as yet another example of wasteful government spending. That's partly why the administration has spent $1 million on road signs touting federally funded projects and $18 million on revamping Recovery.org , a site dedicated to monitoring stimulus spending

Philadelphia residents have a new weapon for fighting municipal corruption: An iPhone app that lets them send photos and video of money-wasting city employees directly to the controller's office. One crusading Philadelphia politician is using iPhones to fight corruption and fraud. City Controller Alan Butkovitz announced the launch of Philly Watchdog , an anti-corruption iPhone application, on April 19

There are multiple nuclear reactors teetering on fault lines around the country, and most of them are surrounded by pools of water filled with still-very-radioactive spent fuel. The radioactivity from the now-exposed spent fuel at Fukushima is part of the reason why the situation there is so dire.

The SETI Institute has stopped listening for aliens, a casualty of government budget cuts. The business community and private donors should pony up. Here's why it's not as crazy as it sounds

Fitting a gasoline-powered car engine with frikkin' laser spark plugs may seem like one sci-fi step too far, but since it improves the combustion and cleans-up the exhaust, it may be the gas engine's last gasp before the electric revolution comes. The design of the spark plug really hasn't changed very much since the gasoline engine was invented--they're a device that creates an electric spark across a very precise small gap to ignite the fuel mixture in each cylinder, and apart from improving their materials and reliability there's not much you can do to tweak that. The problem with spark plugs is that they're not particularly good at their raison d'être.

It has been a year since BP helped make the ultimate oil company screw-up: blowing up an offshore oil rig, killing 11 workers, and then unloading 170 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Ugandan government, facing social unrest over high food and fuel prices, will order its ISPs to block Twitter and Facebook.

What'll it be, world? Gadgets and electricity or pretty views

Ford --which is about to release an all-electric version of the Focus--just put out the above map of the United States with the cities it feels are best suited to electric car ownership. And with a few exceptions, it looks like the flyover states aren't making preparations for the messianic arrival of the electric car. What do you want to bet that in the next presidential election, we'll add "electric-car" to the litany of liberal-associative words like arugula, lattes, and sushi

Why do we demand things of electric cars that we would never demand of normal ones?

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