iPhone News Updated

Petition calls for “ethical” iPhone 5

With Apple’s labor practices in the spotlight, an online group has started a petition asking the company to make its next iPhone model “ethical.”

Nearly 40,000 people have signed the petition to Apple on the online petition site called SumofUs.org, asking Apple to “overhaul the way its suppliers treat their workers in time for the launch of the iPhone 5.”

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director of SumOfUs, said that — as an Apple user herself — she would like to see Apple reform its labor practices, even if it means taking a hit to it profit margin or passing some of the costs onto consumers.

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‘Portlandia’ recap: ‘Cool Wedding’ — iPhone love, courteous drivers and insufferable alt-couples

This week’s field research in the ongoing “Portlandia” study of urban phenomena, circa-2012, included analysis of insufferable couples who feel the need to constantly remind everyone how alternative they are; a fetishistic reverie on the iPhone; and that ultra-Portland ritual, graciously letting the other driver go first at a 4-way stop.

As with the first two episodes, “Cool Wedding” offers more proof that the “Portlandia” crew paid attention to what worked — and what needed work — in season 1 episodes. The sketches this season are shorter, more sharply edited, and structured to not only start with a clever premise, but take it a few steps further and finish with a joke that takes it to an even more logically comic extreme. It’s classic comedy sketch structure, and a welcome addition to the show’s signature whimsy and love of absurdity.

In the pre-credit bit, Carrie Brownstein is getting ready to load her cloth shopping bags (more on them later) into her car, when tragedy strikes — she drops her iPhone. In a cleverly edited back-and-forth, we see the phone falling in excruciating slo-mo, intercut with Carrie’s moments of iPhone bliss. She happily waits in line to buy it, she looks for an answer at pub trivia night, she kisses it good night, and she uses it to photograph a weed-eating goat (yes, non-Portlanders, we did have goats deputized to eat weeds in a vacant lot, and a goat-napping crime story).

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