“My priorities have always been my faith, my family and my country, and, at this stage of my life and after nearly 12 years of public service in Florida and in Washington, it is time to return to Florida and my family,” the 62-year-old said in Orlando, Florida.

“So today I am announcing my decision to step down from public office.”

Martinez said he is resigning “of my own free will. There is no impending reason; it’s only my desire to move on and to get on with the rest of my life.”

He added that he is in good health and that he expects the next phase of his life will take place in the private sector. (CNN)

The organised web assaults completely shut down social networking site Twitter and disrupted access to Facebook — nearly a year to the day since the outbreak of the Georgia-Russia war.

Search engine Google was also targeted but managed to fend off the “denial-of-service” attacks.

Hackers used the popular technique to hijack thousands of computers and use them to send messages to a target website at the same time — causing it to crash. (FOX News)

The Minnesota Supreme Court worked at length to determine whether he or Republican incumbent Norm Coleman had received more votes, and after Coleman contested the election, the limbo dragged on. Franken spent the time reading up on his colleagues, cooking with Franni, his wife of more than 30 years, reading multiple books at a time and devising his first idea for a bill: the Service Dogs for Veterans Act. (Politico)

“This is very tragic news. I’m devastated. I can’t believe he’s gone. He was an American treasure.

“He was always the biggest kid in the room. He was always running around with high top sneakers with no laces in them because he didn’t want to trip on his laces because he’d never tie them. He was just one of the boys and everybody loved being around him. He was a wonderful human being to work with. I loved him like crazy.” (People Magazine)

Employers eliminated 247,000 jobs in July, a huge number by the standards of an ordinary recession, but the smallest monthly loss since last August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. And the unemployment rate, rising for months, actually ticked down, to 9.4 percent from 9.5 percent in June, mainly because so many people dropped out of the hunt for work, ceasing to list themselves as unemployed. (NY Times)

Shriver, 88, was surrounded by her husband, children and grandchildren at Cape Cod Hospital in Barnstable, said family spokesman Stephen Rivers.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the husband of Shriver’s daughter, Maria, was also there, said Aaron McLear, a spokesman for the governor.

Shriver has been weakened in recent years by a series of strokes. She lives in Hyannis Port, near the family compound where her brother, U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, has been staying as he undergoes treatment for brain cancer. (MSNBC)

Speculation of a tablet from Apple has been swirling among analysts and technology blogs for a couple years as other PC makers post big sales of netbooks.

The tablet from Apple will look like an iPod Touch, but a bit larger, said Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, in a research note Friday. He said he spoke with an Asian component supplier that had received orders from Apple for a touch-screen device that would need to be filled by late this year.

The company earned $1 million on $20 million in revenue in July after shipping a record 109 Roadsters. It attributed the profit largely to improved margins on the electric two-seater and a “surge” in orders for the car, which has a base price of $109,000.

“We achieved bottom-line profitability thanks to a tremendous amount of hard work by the Tesla team to improve quality, while simultaneously reducing costs on the Roadster,” company CEO Elon Musk said in a statement. “This also shows there is a strong demand for the car… Moreover, customers know that in buying the Roadster they are helping fund development of our mass-market electric cars.” (Wired)

The Obama administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block the release of disturbing pictures of detainee abuse on grounds their disclosure could incite violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and endanger U.S. troops there.

The administration took the issue to the high court after President Obama in May reversed a decision to stop fighting the release of the photographs.

They were ordered released as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Bush administration had also fought their release, and lost.

The 21 color photographs were taken by service members in Iraq and Afghanistan and were part of criminal investigations of alleged abuse. Some pictures show “soldiers pointing pistols or rifles at the heads of hooded and handcuffed detainees,” Solicitor General Elena Kagan said in her filing with the high court. (FOX News)

“Mays died from a lethal arrhythmia of the heart caused by hypertensive and arteriosclerotic heart disease,” the county said in a statement attributed to Dr. Leszek Chrostowski, the associate medical examiner who conducted the autopsy.

“He further concluded that cocaine use caused or contributed to the development of his heart disease, and therefore contributed to his death,” it added.

The fact that toxicology tests detected only breakdown products of cocaine, not the drug itself, led Chrostowski to conclude that Mays had used cocaine “in the few days prior to death but not immediately prior to death.” (CNN)