As stated, I have been getting news feeds everyday about microsoft, explorer, icann, idn from google. I have noticed a trend in the feeds in the urgency of the development and impliment of idn's, browsers. This has been increasing everyday for the past few weeks. I am going to now just put key sentences about IE 7 of the news stories that I get along with links to them.
I view these statements as direct challenges to Microsoft from various news orgs.
I personally believe the first one to be the biggest development as FireFox are targetting asian countries now partnered with Yahoo. I guess they are sick of waiting on Microsoft.