Here are your Apple rumors and AAPL news items for today:

Supplier Sales Soar: Component suppliers for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) are posting sharp sales increases for July, signaling that production has begun on Apple’s latest iPhone, AppleInsider says. Brian White, an analyst at Topeka Capital Markets, says that Asia-based Apple suppliers are reporting 14% month-over-month sales increases. That is the “strongest month-over-month” growth seen at Apple suppliers in eight years. It is also significantly stronger than the 7% growth seen last July as the company prepared to launch the iPhone 4S. The sharp increase in component sales last month supports predictions that Apple will unveil its next generation iPhone in early September.

Safari Violations Prompt Record Fine: Internet search giant Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle charges from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it evaded security settings in Apple’s Safari browser to gain user data, Reuters noted. Under the terms of its deal with the FTC, Google did not admit any liability relating to the security violations. The government claimed that Google installed cookies that allowed the company to track users’ Internet activity. That fell afoul of a consent agreement Google had signed with the FTC in 2011. The amount paid by Google is a record fine for breaching a FTC agreement. European and American regulators have also been investigating Google over search engine result manipulation.

Siri Gets a Rival: Google is preparing to introduce an app for iOS that will compete with Apple’s voice assistant Siri, PC World notes. Google’s competing service will be incorporated into an updated Google Search app and will be available to both older model iPads and iPhones. Currently Siri is available only on the iPhone 4S and will come to the latest model iPad with the debut of iOS 6. Voice-based search capabilities have already figured into Google Apps, but the new Voice Search from Google has been configured to work in a similar fashion to Siri, using natural language to frame search parameters. Like Siri, it will provide a spoken answer to questions that yield simple answers and display movie listings and weather forecasts.

For more about the company, check out our previous Apple Rumors stories.