Over the weekend, President Obama weighed in on the famous Apple vs. Samsung patent disputes by vetoing an import ban proposed by the International Trade Commission that would have prevented Apple from bringing iOS devices older than the iPhone 4S and iPad 3 into the country.

An avowed fan of Apple’s products, it was the first time a U.S. presidential administration had vetoed a product ban by the ITC since 1987, and seemed to signal that the Obama Administration was not going to penalize an American company like Apple in favor of a foreign company like Samsung.

Financial Markets took notice. Samsung’s market cap is down a billion dollars since the vetoing.

Starbucks has always been a last-ditch sanctuary for the connected in a largely-still-wireless world, but the free WiFi you can get there is often bloated with dozens of slackers, choking up the pipe with inappropriate Netflix streaming and large downloads.

But WiFi at Starbucks is about to get orders of magnitude better. Google has just announced that they are taking over WiFi at Starbucks, and will be the new exclusive provider of sweet, sweet Internet at over 7,000 Starbucks locations in the United States.

That didn’t take long. Following AT&T and T-Mobile’s lead, Verizon has announced a plan for early upgraders that theoretically allows users on their Share Anything plans to update their phones every six months.

At the same Sun Valley conference where Apple CEO Tim Cook and Senior Vice President Eddy Cue are prowling around looking for iTunes deals, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says that the war between Google and Apple isn’t quite so thermonuclear anymore. In fact, he says Cupertino is thawing in many respects towards the search giant.

Details are short on the ground, but The New York Times’ Brian X. Chen is reporting on Twitter that Samsung has purchaseds Boxee, maker of the Boxee Box, one of the Apple TV’s main competitors.