Casey Anthony walks free after acquittal in daughter's death

(CNN) -- Casey Anthony walked free from a Florida jail early Sunday morning, three years and one day after she was first arrested for her role in the disappearance and, eventually, death of her 2-year-old daughter.

Anthony, wearing a pink T-shirt and sweatpants, walked out of the front door of the Orange County jail at 12:08 a.m. with her lawyer by her side and two sheriff's deputies accompanying them.

Anthony and her lawyer, Jose Baez, then climbed into a dark-colored sports utility vehicle that headed eastbound on I-4.

Given the threats that have been made against her life by those furious at the not-guilty verdict, Anthony's lawyers have not said where she will go next.

Throngs of television camera crews and a crowd of about 1,000 people were at hand outside the jail to witness the release.

Most of those who waved placards in the jail parking lot were there to voice their opposition to Anthony's release, but they did so peacefully.

Police, some on horseback, kept a wary eye.

As the pair left, the demonstrators shouted and jeered.

The Orlando woman's release comes 12 days after a jury acquitted her on murder and child neglect charges. That verdict brought an abrupt end to a six-week trial that drew intense media hype for its elements of family drama and the continued mystery over what happened to young Caylee Anthony.

While Anthony was cleared on the more serious charges, the jury of seven women and five men did convict her on four counts of misleading law enforcement agents who were investigating Caylee's whereabouts.

Orange County Superior Court Chief Judge Belvin Perry Jr. gave Anthony credit for time served in determining the release date. She was initially taken into custody July 16, 2008, and had been jailed -- with some brief exceptions, having been freed on bail on multiple occasions -- for most of the past three years.

Her toddler girl's skeletal remains were eventually found in a wooded field not far from the home of Casey Anthony's parents in December 2008, seven months after she was last seen.

Prosecutors tried, unsuccessfully, to convince jurors that the mother used chloroform to render her daughter unconscious and then duct-taped her mouth and nose to suffocate her. Her defense lawyers, meanwhile, painted Caylee's death as an accident, claiming that she'd drowned accidentally at the family pool and that Casey and her father George Anthony both covered it up.

The questions about how Caylee died, and who was responsible, remain open. But a more immediate issue is what happens next to the girl's mother, who attracted intense anger, revulsion and even sympathy from a public that she will once again be a part of.

While there have been cash donations to her jailhouse account, the more widespread sentiment is against Casey Anthony, with many feeling she killed her daughter and got away with it. This fury has led to speculation that the polarizing subject of the "I Hate Casey Anthony" Facebook page -- and the source of ire for its more than 40,000 fans -- might change her name and appearance and move someplace far away.

"If her attorneys are doing the right thing and are doing their jobs, they're going to have to explain to her that there is real hatred out there for her, that there have been death threats, that she cannot just walk amongst the population," HLN legal contributor Sunny Hostin said. "That is not just going to happen."

Florida corrections officials, and Anthony's lawyers, have offered few details about what will happen to her once she's out. That's in part likely due to the intense emotions Anthony's release has generated.

"I know it's bad God Forgive me but i hope someone wipes that smirk off her face. With a mack truck," one poster on the "I Hate Casey Anthony" Facebook page wrote.

Visiting the Orlando site where Caylee's remains were found, Rebecca Stone said she believed her mother "put her here" -- even if the jury did not reach the same conclusion.

When asked about what's next for Casey Anthony, the Flowery Branch, Georgia, mother of two told CNN, "I don't think she will be alive for long."

An Oklahoma woman said she has already faced the kind of ire Anthony may face when she's no longer behind the protective walls of the Orange County Jail.

Sammy Blackwell told CNN affiliate KOTV that a woman who mistook her for Anthony on July 8 rammed her car twice, flipping it over.

"She said that I was trying to hurt babies, I was killing babies and she was going to stop it before it happened again," Blackwell told the station.

As it happens, Blackwell has a daughter named Caylee too, but that's the end of the similarities. She says she really doesn't even look that much like Anthony and worries for women who do.

Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said Tuesday that investigators are assessing threats to Anthony's safety. While he said the department was not aware of any credible threats to her life, it's a concern that was clearly on his mind.

"Nobody has a right to take the law in their own hands," he said. "Casey Anthony had her day in court and the jury made a decision. I would hope people would step back and would not go out and commit another crime."

It's also a concern for her attorneys.

"Myself and other members of the team are concerned for her safety, very much so," one of her attorneys, Dorothy Sims, told HLN.

What Anthony will do after her release is unclear.

"If I knew at this point, I'm sure you can appreciate that I wouldn't tell you," Sims said. "I don't believe that that has been resolved. My hope for her would be that she would be left alone and her privacy would be respected."

Hostin said on CNN that she's heard reports that Anthony will go into hiding, live under an assumed name or get plastic surgery.

"But I think we are going to hear her story, because people have offered her a million dollars already for her story," she said.

Anthony also still has legal issues to deal with.

Her criminal team is appealing her convictions for misleading police, and she is being sued in two separate actions in civil court. One is filed by a woman with the same name Anthony gave to investigators as the name of her daughter's fictitious nanny. The other involves a search group that wants Anthony to repay expenses they incurred looking for Caylee.

Anthony may be offered money for book and movie deals, but one offer won't be on the table.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner told CNN's Piers Morgan that the magazine won't be offering Anthony a pictorial.

"I wouldn't reward someone like that for what has happened," Hefner said.

Defense attorney J. Cheney Mason, who once said he thought of Anthony as a granddaughter, said he doesn't know what life holds in store for his client, but has hopes.

"She is only 25 years old. A decade from now, hopefully, she'll have some stability in her life and maybe a husband, and they can be somewhere in Montana and start over," he said.

U.S. AAA credit rating in jeopardy as risks get reality check

Nearly three years after the financial system crash, the concept of investment risk continues to be turned on its head.

Things have happened in the markets and the economy that have far exceeded most people's worst-case scenarios. What many Americans thought they knew about investing turned out to be dead wrong.

That learning experience is speeding up again. Investors are being forced to rethink a generally accepted financial principle of the postwar era: that the world's developed nations are inherently low-risk places to put money.

The debt problems that have mushroomed in the U.S., Europe and Japan since 2008 have "shattered the concept of the major economies being stable, dependable investments," said Sean Egan, head of Egan-Jones Ratings Co., a smaller rival to Wall Street's credit-rating giants.

This week, two bigger credit raters, Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's, warned that they might soon cut the U.S. government's top-rung AAA debt rating because of the political battle in Washington over the federal debt ceiling and spending cuts.

Think of it. U.S. Treasury bonds are supposed to be the world's "risk-free" asset, in the sense that there should be zero doubt about the government's willingness and ability to pay promised interest and repay principal in full. Treasuries have long been the benchmark by which the risk of other investments is measured. Other interest rates, such as mortgage rates, are set based on Treasury yields.

So it's monumental that S&P, in an announcement Thursday, said that if Congress and the Obama administration failed to agree on a "credible" plan to rein in deficit spending, it might drop its U.S. debt rating from AAA "into the AA category."

That would put the U.S. in with a group of countries that includes Japan, China, Spain and Slovenia. And America would be considered less creditworthy than remaining AAA-rated countries including Canada, Germany, Switzerland,Finland, Norway and Australia.

Finland: The new risk-free asset?

Still, in the realm of debt-rating-speak, a AA rating is considered "high quality." By contrast, that description no longer applies to bonds of Ireland andPortugal, according to Moody's. The firm this month cut both of those countries' ratings to the Ba level, which is the top rung of junk status, or non-investment-grade — i.e., speculative.

A junk rating for Ireland would have been inconceivable to the Irish people just a few years ago. The country's once fast-growing economy, the Celtic tiger of Europe, held Moody's top Aaa rating, or close to it, for most of the last two decades. But since 2009 Ireland's rating has been on a fast slide. Ditto for Portugal and, of course, for Greece, the epicenter of Europe's financial crisis.

The ratings firms — and, belatedly, investors — have come to realize how heavy the debt burdens of these countries have become and how difficult it will be for them to grow their way out of that debt. The same borrowing that fueled their growth since 1990 now is a millstone.

Ireland's public debt equals about 94% of its annual gross domestic product. Portugal's percentage is 83%. Greece's is a stunning 144%. By comparison, U.S. public debt is about 60% of GDP, not counting what's owed to government agencies such as Social Security.

At the other end of the debt spectrum from Western Europe are countries such as South Korea, Slovakia and Brazil, which have public-debt-to-GDP ratios of 24%, 41% and 61%, respectively. Not surprisingly, their investment-grade credit ratings have been untainted by the 2008 global financial crash and its aftereffects.

Greece, Portugal and Ireland, each of which has gone to the European Union for financial aid, now are caught in a vicious cycle: Investors are demanding double-digit market yields on their bonds to compensate for the risk implied by low credit ratings. The annualized yield on two-year Greek bonds is a stunning 33.1%; on Irish two-year bonds it's 23.1%.

If those rates are sustained, the countries will be unable to borrow what they need from investors to roll over maturing debt. Moody's says that makes it more likely the countries will need further help from the European Union — and that the EU eventually will require private bondholders to bear some of the bailout pain by writing off part of the debt.

The U.S., nearly everyone presumes, is a long way from the fates of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Even so, with both Moody's and S&P threatening credit downgrades this week, it would be logical for some investors to feel a bit unnerved about Treasury bonds and demand higher interest rates.

Yet so far, that isn't happening. The yield on two-year Treasury notes ended Friday at a mere 0.36%, down from 0.39% a week ago and near the 2011 low of 0.33% reached June 24. The 10-year T-note yield ended the week at 2.91%, down from 3.03% a week ago.

Byron Wien, a veteran money manager at Blackstone Group in New York, has been predicting for the last year that the 10-year T-note yield would rise to 5%. "I've been very wrong," he said. "I am astonished" that yields remain so low.

Wall Street, usually prone to overreaction, remains underwhelmed by the ratings-cut threats. Why? There is disbelief that the cuts really will happen. Congress must raise the $14.3-trillion federal debt ceiling by Aug. 2 or risk the Treasury running out of money, but by Thursday there was talk in Washington of a compromise between President Obama and Republican leaders that would avert that potential debacle.

What's more, investors rightly are suspicious of the ratings firms. There is the sense that Moody's and S&P are playing hardball with Uncle Sam because their reputations are so tarnished by the many AAA ratings they handed out to mortgage bonds that crumbled with the housing bust.

Wien adds another reason investors keep funneling cash to Treasuries: "U.S. rates are so low because there's so much fear around the world." U.S. consumer confidence in the economy is plummeting again, to lows last seen in 2009. Europe's debt crisis has spread to Spain and Italy. The Middle East remains racked by social upheaval.

Meanwhile, the developing world has a different set of problems. China, India, Brazil and other fast-growing developing countries are tightening credit to curb inflation. That has whacked their stock markets this year while the Dow Jones industrial average holds on to a 7.8% year-to-date gain.

But looking out a few years, global investors are presented with two starkly different choices: Developed countries' onerous debt burdens will continue to retard growth, and those burdens will grow heavier if interest rates rise. For the developing world, where debt levels are light, growth prospects remain bright and interest rates could come down if inflation recedes.

Boiled down to that, it doesn't look like much of a competition.

Google: 6 billion installed apps on Android

During Google's second quarter earnings call yesterday, the company announced it has now seen 6 billion apps installed on Android. The search giant also noted that Android was now seeing 550,000 device activations per day, up from 500,000 just over two weeks ago.

It took Google 20 months to reach the 1 billion apps installed on the Android platform. Five months later, the company had hit the 2 billion apps installed milestone. Two months later, the company was at 3 billion apps installed. That last milestone was reached three months ago. In other words, the company is seeing some 1 billion apps downloaded every month.

Because Android is open, however, the platform's users can download apps from more than one app store. For example, Amazon launched its own Android App Store just last month.

To put the 6 billion number into perspective, Apple announced earlier this month that it had seen 15 billion downloaded apps on iOS. Apple saw 1 billion apps downloaded in April 2009. In April 2011, the company passed the 10 billion apps downloaded mark. While Apple's app downloads are growing, Google's app downloads are not only growing, but they are accelerating as well.

In short, because Android phone sales are growing so quickly, Google's app downloads are going to soon catch Apple's numbers. That's impressive, given that Google's Android Market has over 200,000 apps as of December 2010 while Apple's App Store has over 300,000 apps as of September 2010. It's also expected that the number of apps for Android will eventually pass the number of apps available for iOS.

On Twitter

Philosophically there is no more arbitrary milestone then the passage of time, each year we celebrate the passing of another year, see what I mean? That’s why Twitter’s second five-year anniversary milestones of 350 billion tweets delivered and 600K users signing up daily fall little flat (Twitter celebrated its first five year anniversary — commemorating when the first tweets were sent — back in March). The torrent of tech announcement posts about INSERT COMPANY HERE hitting 100K users or downloads or “shares” or tiddlywinks or badges is perpetual enough that all tech news sort of blends into a river of user numbers and APPLE VS. GOOGLE VS. TWITTER. Sigh.

It is amazing to think that Twitter launched publicly five years ago today. When Mike Arrington first wrote, “Odeo releases Twitter” in 2006 he had no idea that one day the TechCrunch Twitter account would be nearing a 2 million-follower distribution channel and that he himself would reach 82K. Very few would have predicted that the SMS notifications system with no vowel in its name would turn into a seven billion dollar company employing 500 people. “If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea,” Mike wrote at the time.

Mike’s Twttr launch post is striking in its simplicity, at 327 words it’s sort of like the blogger version of the calm before the storm. The social network (?) microblogging platform(?) new form of mass media (?) has been the subject of incessant free press throughout its upward trajectory.

There was a period of time after its breakout at SXSW 2007 where everywhere you’d look you’d see an “… On Twitter” headline: “Man Proposes To Wife … On Twitter.” “Woman Gives Birth… On Twitter.” “Shaquille O’Neal … On Twitter” “Man Tweets From Space … On Twitter.” “Bronx Zoo Cobra … On Twitter.” At this point it’s news if something doesn’t happen “… On Twitter.”

So why can’t we shut up about it? In a sense Twitter is a mirror for life and human connection. There is a unique feeling one gets watching the flood of tweets from strangers pour in for the #iranelection, #WorldCup, #WWDC or any microhashtag on Twitter. A crucial part of my morning ritual is catching up with news on Twitter watching the quips made by friends pour in on equal footing with commentary made by media luminaries.

Thus I’ve been asking people all morning (on Twitter) about what Twitter, a service built essentially to communicate spurts of human activity, means to them. I’ve gotten back so much information it is tough and kind of meta to process, kind of like Twitter itself.

A sampling of important Twitter moments I’ve heard so far, in more or less chronological order:

When Apple released iTunes podcasting (because it forced Odeo to pivot), March 2006: the first tweet, July 2006: we cover Twttr, Twttr becomes Twitter, March 2007: it’s the breakout hit of SXSW, the fail whale supplants the fail cat, the #hashtag is invented, a plane is Twitpic’d landing in the Hudson river, CNN and Ashton’s race to a million followers, Oprah joins, the co-founders play musical chairs, Twitter buying mobile client Atebits (signaling the end of friendly developer ecosystem relations), #new Twitter, more downtime, the Iran riots, the time Twitter was hacked and so on and so forth.

The most striking thing is that most Twitter users have their own unique list of moments that cemented Twitter’s importance (for those that can tolerate slideshows Business Insider has a really good one here).

If you suspend disbelief on what percentage are spambots, Twitter has 200 million users whose #1 Twitter milestone is “Just setting up my Twttr” or the day they set up and account.

The company hopes by the end of 2013 to have 1 billion users (more than Facebook) in addition to $1.5 billion in revenue and an over 5,000 person staff. Just typing out that sort of ambition is sort of painful when the service still shows me that I’m following people who I’m not and is all over the place with regards to a steady revenue stream. For what it’s worth I’d pay Twitter $10 bucks a month just to archive and thread my DMs.

In fact, I think there’s many that would do the same and today we’re all wishing Silicon Valley’s charismatic but sort of flakey friend a very happy second birthday; Because honestly we’re all rooting for them.