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Archive for May 2008

The photos are being used to prove the tribe’s existence
Image: Gleison Miranda, Funai

One of South America’s few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.

The Brazilian government says it took the images to prove the tribe exists and help protect its land.

The pictures, taken from an aeroplane, show red-painted tribe members brandishing bows and arrows.

More than half the world’s 100 uncontacted tribes live in Brazil or Peru, Survival International says.

Stephen Corry, the director of the group – which supports tribal people around the world – said such tribes would “soon be made extinct” if their land was not protected.

‘Monumental crime’

Survival International says that although this particular group is increasing in number, others in the area are at risk from illegal logging.

Uncontacted tribe near Brazil-Peru border

The photos were taken during several flights over one of the most remote parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s Acre region.

They show tribe members outside thatched huts, surrounded by the dense jungle, pointing bows and arrows up at the camera.

“We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,” the group quoted Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior, an official in the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department, as saying.

“This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.”

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Angelina Jolie may not have given birth – yet. But Vanity Fair gives readers a glimpse of Angie’s other twins on this month’s cover as the buxom actress discusses why boyfriend Brad Pitt makes her love being knocked up.

“I’m fortunate,” she said. “I think some women have a different experience depending on their partner. I think that affects it. I happen to be with somebody who finds pregnancy very sexy so that makes me feel very sexy.”

Jolie, who stars in both this summer’s action flick “Wanted” and cartoon comedy “Kung Fu Panda,” says she doesn’t even mind waddling around for nine long months.

“I love it. [Pregnancy] makes me feel like a woman. It makes me feel that all the things about my body are suddenly there for a reason. It makes you feel round and supple, and to have a little life inside you is amazing.”

For more on Jolie, visit VanityFair.com.

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BEIJING (Reuters) – Luxury retailer Christian Dior has pulled advertisements featuring Sharon Stone from stores across China after the actress suggested the country’s earthquake was “bad karma” for Beijing’s policies in Tibet.

At least 68,000 people died in the May 12 quake in southwest China, which came months after unrest in Tibet that sparked an international outcry over Beijing’s handling of the predominantly Buddhist region, which Communist troops entered in 1950.

“Due to some customer reaction we have decided to pull her image from all of the department stores and from all of China,” Christian Dior China said in a statement.

Stone has a modeling contract with the cosmetics arm of the luxury retailer for which newly rich China is a fast-growing market.

“We just want our customers and fans to realize that her personal comments are not related to the company and of course we don’t support any type of commentary that will hurt the feelings of our customers,” Dior said.

The Beijing Times reported that Chinese cinemas would not show Stone’s films, though China already strictly limits the number of foreign movies it distributes in theatres.

Her movies include “Basic Instinct” in 1992 and “Casino” and “The Quick and the Dead”, both in 1995.

Stone apologized for her comments in remarks carried in Chinese media on Thursday.

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Sex and the City

Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times

Friends gather for a cocktail before the midnight screening of “Sex and the City” at the ArcLight Theater.

Some of the show’s fans are making an event out of it, gathering large groups of friends, donning outfits that would make Carrie envious and drinking cosmos, of course.

MOCK them at your own risk. They have heels and they know how to use them.

They’re showing up in droves, in posses, in very well-dressed tribes. Worshipers of “Sex and the City” may not look like Comic-Con fans but they’re every bit as tenacious — and they smell better. Tickets for the ArcLight Hollywood’s 12:01 a.m. Friday show of the movie based on the HBO series sold out so quickly that the theater added a 12:02 show. Then 12:03. And so on, for seven post-midnight shows, and 1,800 tickets sold.

And they aren’t just there for the flick; they’re making an event of it. By 10:30 Thursday night, the bar and restaurant were full of groups of women, and the occasional man, downing cocktails and awaiting the midnight hour. “If you see a cosmo on a table, they’re going to ‘Sex and the City,’ ” said waiter James Warfield as he carried a tray bearing the show’s signature drink. “I have a lot more ladies than usual.”

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What’s one way that Google is different from AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft? It’s the only one of the big Internet companies that doesn’t put a link to its privacy policy on its home page.

Indeed, Google believes so strongly that adding the phrase “privacy policy” to its famously Spartan home page would distract users that it has picked a fight with an advertising trade group over the issue.

After it agreed to buy DoubleClick, Google applied to join the Network Advertising Initiative, a trade group that sets standards for companies that collect data for use in targeting advertising. DoubleClick was instrumental in forming the N.A.I. in 1999 in response to outrage over its plans, since abandoned, to link online advertising to personal data from catalog companies. Read more …

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Can Steven P. Jobs top the iPhone … with another iPhone?

Last June, Mr. Jobs began selling what has become one of the most talked-about consumer products in history. Now he faces a new challenge as Apple prepares to introduce an updated version of the phone next month.

After almost a year of strong sales that have made it one of the dominant smartphones in the United States, the iPhone has settled down to a less-than-spectacular pace: roughly 600,000 units a month, according to the company.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., had shipped about 5.5 million phones by the end of March, the most recent figures it has released. It sold just 1.7 million phones in the first three months of this year, meaning it must sell more than 8 million phones to reach Mr. Jobs’s publicly stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008.

“They’re going to have a difficult time” hitting that number, said Edward Snyder, an analyst at Charter Equity Research. He said that Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, sells more phones every week than Apple has sold since the iPhone’s introduction.

So what could Apple’s impresario have up his sleeve to pick up the pace — and to keep the second-generation iPhone from being a letdown?

Although the company will not publicly confirm the arrival of a second iPhone, Apple watchers have concluded that a new version will be introduced June 9, the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

Apparently in preparation for the event, stocks of the existing iPhone have been dwindling in the last month.

Although AT&T stores still have phones in stock, according to a company spokesman, the supply has largely dried up in Apple’s retail outlets, and the phones are no longer available through the company’s online store.

Apple may be trying to avoid the anger it faced last September when it cut the iPhone’s price by $200 just two months after it went on sale, making early buyers feel cheated. Mr. Jobs offered those customers a $100 store credit.

Cutting down on supply means fewer angry buyers when their new phone is suddenly obsolete.

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RAMALLAH, West Bank — Nibbling doughnuts and wrestling with computer code, the workers at G.ho.st, an Internet start-up here, are holding their weekly staff meeting — with colleagues on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

They trade ideas through a video hookup that connects the West Bank office with one in Israel in the first joint technology venture of its kind between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Start with the optimistic parts, Mustafa,” Gilad Parann-Nissany, an Israeli who is vice president for research and development, jokes with a Palestinian colleague who is giving a progress report. Both conference rooms break into laughter.

The goal of G.ho.st is not as lofty as peace, although its founders and employees do hope to encourage it. Instead G.ho.st wants to give users a free, Web-based virtual computer that lets them access their desktop and files from any computer with an Internet connection. G.ho.st, pronounced “ghost,” is short for Global Hosted Operating System.

“Ghosts go through walls,” said Zvi Schreiber, the company’s British-born Israeli chief executive, by way of explanation. A test version of the service is available now, and an official introduction is scheduled for Halloween.

The Palestinian office in Ramallah, with about 35 software developers, is responsible for most of the research and programming. A smaller Israeli team works about 13 miles away in the central Israeli town of Modiin.

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Kiichiro Sato/Associated Press

Like other airlines, Northwest has been hurt by soaring fuel prices. The company it is merging with, Delta Air Lines, raised ticket prices 6 percent and flew its planes with fewer empty seats.

Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, preparing to merge amid a steep industry downturn, reported a combined first-quarter loss of $10.5 billion on Wednesday, most of it an accounting recognition that the two carriers are worth far less than when they emerged from bankruptcy a year ago.

Airline stocks were relatively stable Wednesday afternoon after plunging Tuesday, led by a decline of more than 35 percent at UAL, the parent of United Airlines. Northwest closed down 5 percent on Wednesday, to $7.10 a share, and Delta fell 3.5 percent, to $6.56 a share.

Across the industry, carriers are reeling from a huge increase in fuel costs — roughly 50 percent above first-quarter prices in 2007 — and preparing for a decline in demand with the economy faltering.

Delta and Northwest plan to merge, in hopes the combination would produce savings and other efficiencies of more than $1 billion by 2012. Others are in merger discussions, too. But for the industry to return to consistent profitability, airlines will need to push through big fare increases, which to date have been resisted by some discount carriers and by price-focused customers.

In the meantime, in a replay of the period after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, carriers will be reducing their domestic schedules, laying off workers, deferring investments in planes and other equipment, and generally hunkering down.

A handful of bankruptcies among smaller carriers already this year could grow to include bigger ones if oil remains above $100 a barrel.

As a buffer against the downturn, Delta had $2.6 billion in unrestricted cash and short-term investments and Northwest had $3.2 billion, both as of March 31.

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(Reuters) – Alicia Keys has canceled two shows on her newly launched North American tour because of swollen vocal cords, her record label said on Wednesday.

The 27-year-old R&B singer scrapped Tuesday’s show in Pittsburgh, the third stop of the tour, and has also pulled the plug on Thursday’s concert in Cleveland.

The tour is expected to resume in Columbus on Saturday. Tickets for the Cleveland show will be honored at Columbus, said J Records.

Keys’ tour, to promote her chart-topping album “As I Am,” began last Saturday in Hampton, Va.

Sore throats must be contagious on the tour. One of Keys’ opening acts, 2007 “American Idol” winner Jordin Sparks, has been unable to perform because of an acute vocal cord hemorrhage. Her Jive Records label expected her to join the trek in May.

Dates are on tap through June 18 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Reuters/Nielsen

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Microsoft tried to shrug off its rejection by Yahoo! yesterday after insisting that it was looking for other ways to spend its $50 billion (£25 billion) acquisition pot.

The software company was forced to abandon its $47.5 billion approach for Yahoo! this month, after the online search company insisted on a higher price and threatened to hive off the most lucrative part of its business should Microsoft turn hostile.

Since then Microsoft has reopened talks to buy a much smaller part of Yahoo! and acquire a modest, passive stake in the internet group.

Both companies are discussing the feasibility of combining their online advertising businesses.

At a conference in Moscow yesterday, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, said: “You can buy a whole lot of things for $50 billion.”

It is understood that after Microsoft walked away from the initial talks, the company was both approached, and itself contacted, by a number of parties that had also been in discussions with Yahoo!. Of those, it is believed that Microsoft began talks with Time Warner with a view to buying AOL, the cable company’s internet arm.

Mr Ballmer said: “Yahoo! was never the strategy we were pursuing – it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business. We will spend money on some acquisitions.” Microsoft needs to do a deal to compete more effectively with Google, the world’s biggest internet company. Google holds the lion’s share of the online advertising market, estimated to be worth $40 billion a year and which is expected to double by 2010.

Mr Ballmer had argued three weeks ago that the main reason the company had walked away from Yahoo! was because of price. He had said: “We are interested to pay for it [Yahoo!] at some level and beyond that level we’re not willing to pay for it.” Although Mr Ballmer offered to raise his valuation of Yahoo! from $31 a share to $33 a share, Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo! said that he would not sell for less than $37.

Although Yahoo! has managed to dodge a full takeover from Microsoft, it also has to contend with the threat of a boardroom coup orchestrated by Carl Icahn, the billionaire shareholder activist.

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