According to the article, DHS overstated the severity of the problem and corrected themselves later. Of course, everyone remembers the false report and never the correction. God knows what EDA was told by DHS at first.

The interesting thing is the word solely. Hypothetically, if this app had covered several modern conflicts around the globe rather than specifically Syria it would not have been banned. I get the feeling Apple is trying curb apps that are overtly or covertly racist and there's always going to be legitimate apps that are afoul. On the other hand, the guidelines did originally suggest writing a book if you had some political viewpoint to express.

Pixel was completely misused in the article. He's working an image scaling algorithm for photos. That isn't saying that it's not noteworthy, interesting or important; it looks like it works great and I'm not aware of anything that produces results that good on photos. There is the Hqx family of filters, but those were designed for emulators and aren't meant to be used with more than 256 colors.

It is backwards compatible with DS and DSiWare games. That was said during the keynote but articles don't seem to mention it for some reason.

Do they mean it this time?

MNG is the "official" animated version. APNG was rejected as an official extension. However, APNG is backwards compatible with PNG, a static image is displayed instead of an animated one in browsers that don't support it, and it also supported by more browsers. Firefox 3+ and Opera 9.5+ support APNG, but only Konqueror currently supports MNG out of the box.

Plus, it runs on the most platforms; Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Symbian* and Windows Mobile*; and it's just vanilla HTML, JS and SVG zipped up.
*Once Opera Mobile 9.5 ships.