>NATO Airstrike Reportedly Kills Rebels in Libya

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A NATO airstrike intended for the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi killed 13 rebel fighters in the battle outside the pivotal oil port of Brega, the rebels said Saturday.

The deaths underscored the challenge that the Western allies and the rebels face in relying on airstrikes to push back the Qaddafi forces as the two sides mix in the battle zone along the front.

Perhaps in response to the Western airstrikes, the Qaddafi forces are increasingly plunging into combat in equipment similar to what the rebels are using, mainly pickup trucks mounted with artillery guns. The move makes it increasingly difficult for even the combatants to distinguish one group from the other at first sight.

“It’s a mistake,” said Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, the rebel’s main spokesman. “Nothing has changed.”

One rebel fighter who was wounded in the airstrike said a fellow rebel had fired artillery into the air moments before the attack.

“I don’t know why,” the rebel, Ali Abdullah Abubaker, said later from a hospital in Benghazi. “Maybe he was scared.”

Seconds later, Mr. Abubaker heard the planes. “I saw something white,” he said. “There was no sound.”

His white pickup truck was set on fire, and he said three of the four other men in the car were killed. Mr. Abubaker, a college student studying political science, had burns on his face and was struck by bullets in his car that ignited in the blast.

A NATO spokesman in Brussels said the alliance was aware of the report and was investigating.

“NATO takes reports of civilian casualties very seriously,” the spokesman said. “But for us, exact details are hard to verify because we do not have reliable sources on the ground.”

The spokesman, who, according to NATO policy, asked not to be identified, added, “If someone fires at one of our aircraft, they have the right to defend themselves.”

NATO said that it had conducted 148 airstrike sorties in the previous 24 hours.

The strike occurred after dark on Friday as rebels were continuing their efforts to retake Brega. The Qaddafi forces had positioned forward observers in the desert outside of the city with a view of the road, enabling their superior artillery crews within Brega to hit the rebels as they tried to approach.

A group of about four rebel trucks had entered a no-man’s land of close fighting between the lines of the two sides, where they mixed with similar trucks of the Qaddafi militia. Around 8:30 p.m., several allied strikes were heard at the front.

Mr. Abubaker said the rebels had been told to search the area.

The men had stopped for prayers on a stretch of the road between Ajdabiya and Brega. A few seconds before the bombing, rebels driving a Mitsubishi truck with an artillery gun mounted on the back pulled up near the group, and one of the rebels — a man Mr. Abubaker knew — started firing the weapon into the air.

A rebel ambulance driver who arrived at the scene about an hour later said he found only the blackened remains of the four trucks and eight or nine bodies so badly burned and mangled by the explosion that he could not determine the exact number.

“I saw the fire, and the bodies, eight or nine bodies,” said the driver, Akhmed al-Ginashi. “They were totally burned.”

At Benghazi’s hospital, Brahim Fahim al-Oraybey, a 19-year-old rebel fighter, said he had been wounded in the blast. His right leg was amputated below the knee, and he was badly burned across his face, back, shoulders and hands.

He said there had been six vehicles, including an ambulance, in front of him in a convoy when the explosion struck. He had been riding in a white pickup with a machine gun mounted on the back, a favorite combat configuration of both the rebels and Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. He said he saw a local shepherd who lost both arms in the blast, but his fate was not clear.

Around the scene of the airstrikes, rebel fighters speculated that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had infiltrated the rebel lines and fired at the planes, or that celebrating rebels shooting guns into the air had drawn the allied fire.

Here on the eastern front and in the besieged western city of Misurata, rebel fighters said Saturday that they were anxious about what they perceived as a slowdown in the airstrikes, enabling Colonel Qaddafi to hold on as his forces regroup and advance.

The battle lines remained largely unchanged, centered to the east of Brega, as the fighting continued Saturday. A few rebels had established a light presence in the city, near the university, but the Qaddafi forces remained in solid control.

Although airstrikes have taken out some of the Qaddafi forces’ tanks and heavy weapons, the militia had evidently held back some of its military equipment in the relatively dense urban area, where the NATO forces cannot strike without the risk of civilian casualties.

In Washington, two lawmakers, Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, argued in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal that Western forces should refocus their airstrikes on toppling Colonel Qaddafi, moving beyond the initial mandate to protect Libyan civilians.

“A successful outcome in Libya requires the departure of Gadhafi as quickly as possible,” the senators wrote, using an alternate spelling for Qaddafi. “It is not in our interest for Libya to become the scene of a protracted stalemate that will destabilize and inflame the region.”

They continued, “The battlefield reversals suffered by the opposition this week, when weather conditions hampered coalition airstrikes, underscore the need for a more robust and coherent package of aid to the rebel ground forces.”

As a stalemate held in the eastern front, the capital, Tripoli, remained under a tight lockdown. A panic set off by the defection of the Qaddafi confidant Moussa Koussa eased slightly as only one other high-level official appeared to have fled in his wake. According to former government officials, guards were preventing others from leaving.

One senior official who had said he planned to travel to Egypt to pick up family members canceled his trip, telling reporters that he delayed it because of a paperwork problem.

There was no word on the details of talks in London by a senior aide to one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, though British officials said the aide had returned to Libya.

In an informal currency market in the old city of Tripoli, traders said Libyan dinars were selling for less than half their value just a month ago. Colonel Qaddafi has flooded the economy with new money by providing a 500-dinar subsidy to each family and pay raises to all soldiers, apparently in an effort to bolster his support.

And, currency traders said in recent days, many are hedging against the long-term survival of the Qaddafi government as well.

>Will Sony Supply the iPhone 5 With an 8MP Camera?

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Will the iPhone 5 have an 8-megapixel camera? Reports say that Sony CEO Howard Stringer let the cat out of the bag during an interview with Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal.

“It always puzzles me,” Stringer said. “Why would I make Apple the best camera?”

Both the 5-megapixel camera on the iPhone 4 and the 3.2-megapixel device on the iPhone 3GS have been supplied by OmniVision. Electronista first revealed in February that Sony could replace OmniVision as the camera provider for Apple’s smartphone, creating a beefed-up 8-megapixel sensor for the device. Electronista said Sony would take over for OmniVision because the latter wouldn’t be able to produce the camera in time for the launch of the iPhone 5.

Stringer’s statements have given additional fuel to this report. He also reveled that 15 Sony factories in Japan, including a camera sensor plant, were damaged by the earthquake in the beginning of March, thus delaying part shipments.

According to another report, there could be some truth to these rumors. A report surfaced earlier this week that said the iPhone 5 won’t make its debut until October or later. The report, which originally appeared on Macotakara and was translated by AppleInsider, also said that Apple hasn’t even ordered components for the next-generation iPhone. So even if Sony is slated to provide the iPhone 5’s camera, those plans might not be set in stone.

Macotakara predicted an iPhone 5 launch in the first half of fiscal 2012, it isn’t likely that Apple would miss the opportunity for holiday season sales, and AppleInsider predicted an October or November launch.

The iPhone 5 rumors have been floating around for several months now. The most recent reports contend that the phone will have an edge-to-edge screen. Other rumors claim that the design of the back of the phone could be different, ditching glass for aluminum and moving the antenna from the external frame.

>RIM CMO Out on Eve of Playbook Tablet Launch

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RIM might be close to making its tablet debut with its upcoming Playbook, but there’s one thing that won’t be accompanying this device to the market: an ongoing chief marketing officer.

According to a Friday report by the Wall Street Journal, RIM’s chief marketing officer Keith Pardy is leaving the company following a six-month transition period. 

According to a statement by RIM, “personal reasons” are behind the departure, but there’s been no elaboration—official or otherwise—as to what those could be. Pardy allegedly made the decision to depart a month ago.

RIM poached Pardy from Nokia in late 2009. The departure now leaves RIM without an executive on top mere weeks before the company is expected to launch its flagship Playbook table—either in late March or early April, depending on which batch of rumors you subscribe to. However, according to IHS iSuppli analyst Rhoda Alexander, the executive departure isn’t likely to affect the Playbook’s launch.

“Hopefully, when you’re weeks away from product release, you’ve laid most of the groundwork for the marketing efforts,” said Alexander in an interview with Reuters. “Others can execute the groundwork that’s been laid out.”

Although RIM still enjoys considerable success amongst U.S. smartphone owners—it’s currently tied with Apple for a 27 percent market share, says The Neilsen Company–jumping into the Apple-focused tablet market is another battle entirely. According to the latest figures from Strategy Analytics, Apple cruised to a 95.5-percent tablet market share in the third quarter of 2010 before dropping to 75.3 percent in the fourth quarter. Over all of 2010, however, Apple commanded 84.1 percent of the tablet market, with Android-based devices barely making a dent at 13.1 percent.

A total of 9.7 million tablet devices sold globally made up the aforementioned fourth-quarter statistics. That’s an important number, because Digitimes has reported that RIM allegedly expects to sell one million playbooks in the first quarter of 2011. Pretending, for a moment, that those sales occurred in the fourth quarter of 2010, one million Playbooks sold would have put the RIM at a market share of 9.35 percent.

But remember, by the time the RIM Playbook’s launch rolls around, it will be staring down the barrel of two of the market’s fiercest competitors: Apple’s iPad 2, and what’s been heralded as the first true Android-based competitor to the iPad, Motorola’s Xoom. With these two heavyweights duking it out, one million units sold for RIM’s Playbook could be a difficult target to hit—and might not give RIM even ten percent market share in the aftermath.