Internet search-engine giant Google slashed billions of dollars from the target launch valuation of its stock on Wednesday in a major upset for the biggest technology flotation since the dot.com bubble burst four years ago. Google said it has reduced the price range of its flotation shares to between and .
Julia Child, the chef who brought the intricacies of French cuisine to American home cooks through her television series and books, has died in her sleep. She was 91. ”America has lost a true national treasure,” Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity for Alfred A Knopf Publishing, said in a statement on Friday.
The price of oil in the United States on Wednesday fell slightly on Wednesday with contracts for September deliveries on the New York Mercantile Exchange falling 0,2% to ,61 per barrel. On Tuesday, oil prices reached a new record of ,04 per barrel.
Andre 3000 is the world’s best-dressed man, according to Esquire magazine. ”He’s a complete individual,” Nick Sullivan, Esquire‘s fashion director, said on Tuesday. ”But that’s really the point.” Andre 3000 is the usually over-the-top dressed half of hip-hip duo OutKast.
John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, published a list of about 200 entrepreneurs supporting his run for the White House, in an effort to reassure voters of his moderate credentials. The list, not unexpectedly, included endorsements from players in the entertainment and fashion industries. Among the signatories were Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein and designer Donna Karan.
For the anxious-looking women taking a cigarette break this week on the corner of 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue, there was only one topic of conversation. Unlike former terror threats, the warnings from the United States Department of Homeland Security last Sunday were remarkably specific and the Citigroup building we were in front of was one of five potential targets named in the financial sector.
Pamela Anderson has a new best friend: her ghostwriter. The 37-year-old model-actress added novelist to her résumé on Tuesday with the release of Star, published by Atria Books. But the former Baywatch babe didn’t do it alone. ”The first meeting we knew it was magic,” said Anderson about her not-so-invisible ghostwriter Eric Shaw Quinn.
Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks and a score of other top musical acts have joined forces for a series of nationwide shows to help oust President George Bush from the White House. The week-long set of concert dates, beginning on October 1, targets key battleground states that are expected to go to the wire on election day, November 2.
In New York everything has a price tag, so it seems, and now you can even pay to shop, on a tour of the city’s most coveted shop windows. For , a good guide can leave a shopper breathless. ”Hurry up … we won’t have any time left to go to Soho,” Rebecca Merritt, a guide for Shop Gotham told her group: a dozen teachers from Missouri, whose state motto is ”show me”.
A new battle to corner the market in cheap, off-patent medicines began this week as the United States’s Mylan Laboratories bought its rival, King Pharmaceuticals, in a -billion deal that will create the second-biggest prescription drugs company in the US. The all-paper takeover of King will create a corporation with -billion in annual revenue and 6 000 staff — including 1 400 sales representatives.
Laurance Rockefeller, a conservationist, philanthropist and leading figure in the field of venture capital, died in his sleep on Sunday morning. He was 94. The cause of death was pulmonary fibrosis, his spokesperson said in a statement. Rockefeller was number 377 on this year’s Forbes magazine list of 587 billionaires, with ,5-billion.
Rising oil prices and disappointing forecasts for the technology sector sent stocks in the United States skidding on Tuesday, with pessimism over the economy further fueling the selloff. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index fell more than 2%, its biggest loss since mid-March.
America Online (AOL) on Thursday announced a -million deal to acquire online marketing firm Advertising.com, a resounding vote of confidence in the internet advertising market that many had until recently written off for good. The acquisition is the first significant one made by AOL since the ill-fated takeover of Time Warner in 2000.
Michael Melvill, the pilot of the first manned private trip to the edge of space this week, has told how he feared he would not return from the landmark mission.
The South African-born Melvill told the New York Times, that SpaceShipOne lurched to the left and suffered a key control system failure that left him feeling ”deathly afraid”.
Fresh concern has been raised that United States Vice-President Dick Cheney may have played a role in the decision to award his former company Halliburton a -billion contract for work in post-war Iraq. According to a congressional investigation, Cheney’s top aide, Lewis Libby, was involved in high-level talks in October 2002, which led to the firm securing the contract.
Bill Clinton says in his new autobiography that his wife looked as if he had punched her in the gut when he finally confessed to his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and he slept on the couch for at least two months after that. In My Life, the former president wrote that the affair with the White House intern revealed ”the darkest part of my inner life”.
Wall Street Journal reporters plan to withhold their bylines from articles for two days this week as contract negotiations with their employer, Dow Jones, turn increasingly rancorous. The Independent Association of Publishers Employees, a union representing US reporters at the Journal, called on its members on Monday to withhold their bylines from stories in the Wednesday and Thursday editions of the paper.
The man dubbed by federal agents as the ”Last Don”, Joseph ”Big Joey” Massino, has gone on trial in New York, with prosecutors hoping for a conviction that could deal a knockout blow to organised crime in the city. Massino, the alleged boss of the Bonanno crime family, is charged with seven murders and a host of racketeering charges.
Online retailers in the United States collectively made a profit last year for the first time as sales jumped a better-than-expected 51%, in a sign of continued resilience in e-commerce, an industry survey found. Online sales surged to -billion last year, surpassing forecasts of -billion, fuelled by the travel category, according to an annual survey of 150 retailers.
United States music consumers are sharply increasing their interest in legal downloads and diminishing their use of free song-swapping over the internet, a survey showed on Wednesday. The survey by the NPD Group found about five percent of those who have purchased music CDs also used a legal internet service to purchase music in the first quarter of 2004, or triple the percentage in the same period a year ago.
Frank Quattrone, one of the highest flying investment bankers on Wall Street during the dotcom boom, came crashing to earth on Monday when he was found guilty of obstruction of justice.
The explosive photos of abuse in an Iraqi prison drive home a defining fact of 21st century life — that the pervasiveness of digital photography and the speed of the internet make it easier to see into dark corners previously out of reach for the mass media.
Court rulings have pulled the most popular software for copying DVD movies off the market, but a new programme, already on sale at CompUSA and Wal-Mart, is trying to get around these rulings and still let users duplicate copy-protected discs. The new software, called 123 Copy DVD, sells for as little as ,99.
Electronics giant Sony has jumped into the online music fray with a new download service similar to those from Apple and others, but linked to its Walkman music players. The Japanese firm formally launched Connect.com on Tuesday, offering song downloads for 99 United States cents.
The world’s top five music companies, in a deal announced on Tuesday, agreed to pay -million in unclaimed royalties to thousands of artists, including stars such as David Bowie and Dolly Parton. The companies included Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Universal Music, EMI Music Publishing and BMG Songs.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who broke new ground with their internet search engine, are about to test their strategy on Wall Street. The two are effectively billionaires based on Google’s market value and and could become even more wealthy with the launch of Google’s estimated ,7-billion initial public offering.
Estée Lauder, who started a kitchen business blending face creams and built it into an international cosmetics empire, has died. She was 97. Lauder died of cardiopulmonary arrest late on Saturday at her home in Manhattan, said Sally Susman, a company spokesperson.
For years, critics have accused the International Monetary Fund of being secretive, imposing overly austere policies on developing countries in exchange for its loans and refusing to look critically at its own policies — or admit its mistakes. In the past, the IMF has brushed away such attacks. But recently, the institution is showing signs of becoming more openly self-critical.
An empty Amtrak train ploughed into the back of a commuter-laden train near New York’s Penn Station on Monday, leaving 130 people with minor injuries, fire department officials said. The collision occurred just after 7am local time as the packed commuter train was waiting to enter the station.
Hackers have broken into some of the world’s most powerful computer clusters in recent weeks in an apparently coordinated cyber attack targetting research and academic institutions. Although officials sought on Wednesday to play down the seriousness of the threats, some security experts warned that such a break-in could potentially enable a serious attack on the internet.
African-American women are 23 times as likely to be infected with the Aids virus as white women and account for 71,8% of new HIV cases among women in 29 American states, research shows. A non-profit health organisation has found that in 2001 about 67% of black women with Aids had contracted the virus through heterosexual sex — up from 58% four years earlier.
Howell Raines, the former editor of The New York Times, whose career was brought to an abrupt end by the actions of the plagiarist reporter Jayson Blair, gave one eviscerating interview shortly after he was deposed. Then there was silence. Raines’s devastating critique of The New York Times has thrown up disturbing questions about the future of the ‘world’s greatest newspaper’.