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/ 13 February 2008
Film director Steven Spielberg and actress Mia Farrow joined activists worldwide on Tuesday in using the Olympics as a backdrop to address human rights concerns, urging Beijing to exert political leverage on Sudan’s government to help end the crisis in Darfur.
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/ 11 February 2008
Yahoo! is set to reject Microsoft’s unsolicited bid, now worth -billion, as too low, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters on Saturday — the first clear signal the board might be prepared to negotiate and sell the internet media giant. The Wall Street Journal had quoted an unnamed source as saying Microsoft’s offer of per share was an attempt to ”steal” the company.
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/ 6 February 2008
Australian actor Heath Ledger’s death was an accident caused by the abuse of prescription drugs, six of which were found in his body, the New York City medical examiner’s office said on Wednesday. Ledger (28), renowned for his role as a gay cowboy in the 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain, was found dead in bed at his Manhattan apartment on January 22.
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/ 3 February 2008
French ”sports chic” label Lacoste wowed the crowd with a ski-themed show on Saturday at New York Fashion Week, kicking off the 75th year of the little crocodile that conquered the United States. Lacoste was one of the first designers to put its logo — the iconic green crocodile — on the outside of its garments.
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/ 2 February 2008
With a market value of -billion, Google’s power has become awe-inspiring. Its profits rocketed by 40% to ,2-billion last year and it swallowed the popular video-sharing website YouTube. Through Microsoft’s ,6-billion takeover bid for Yahoo!, the technology establishment hit back at Google’s seemingly unstoppable rise.
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/ 1 February 2008
Technology giant Microsoft said on Friday that it had offered to acquire internet media company Yahoo! for ,6-billion in cash and stock. Microsoft said it had offered to buy Yahoo! for per share, which it said represented a 62% premium above the company’s closing stock price on Nasdaq on Thursday.
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/ 23 January 2008
Actor Heath Ledger was found dead at a Manhattan apartment, naked in bed with sleeping pills nearby, police said. He was 28. Ledger, who moved to the United States at age 19, quickly turned away from typical teen films and instead started to build a career on more challenging roles.
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/ 22 January 2008
The New Yorker art rebel and Holocaust survivor Boris Lurie died after a long, difficult illness, the Berlin publicist Matthias Reichelt said on Tuesday. Lurie, who was 83, died on Monday. Born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union, Lurie was an artist and author who survived several different concentration camps.
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/ 22 January 2008
United Nations peacekeepers monitoring the disputed border between Ethiopia and Eritrea may have to halt operations within weeks because Eritrea has cut diesel fuel supplies, said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The fuel stoppage is linked to the border dispute that brought the two impoverished Horn of Africa countries.
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/ 16 January 2008
The award-winning Broadway musical Rent will end its 12-year-run in New York this June, according to an announcement on the production’s website. The musical, composed by Jonathan Larson, chronicles the struggles of a group of young artists in New York.
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/ 12 January 2008
The United Nations Security Council opened the door on Friday to new economic, political or military sanctions against Sudan because of an attack by its troops on a UN peacekeeping convoy earlier this week. The council said it ”condemns in the strongest possible terms” Monday’s attack on UN peacekeepers by ”elements of the Sudanese armed forces”.
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/ 10 January 2008
It is billed as the ”first flush” — the ceremonial opening of a new public toilet on the streets of New York City. The first of 20 public toilets under the city’s street-furniture contract with Spanish advertising giant Cemusa opened on Thursday at Madison Square Park in Manhattan.
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/ 10 January 2008
Morocco and Western Sahara’s Polisario independence movement ended a third round of talks near New York City on Wednesday without narrowing differences on Africa’s longest-running territorial dispute. But United Nations mediator Peter van Valsum said the sides had agreed to meet again from March 11 to 13 at the same location in the town of Manhasset.
Two New York men wheeled the corpse of their friend around the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan in an office chair in a failed attempt to cash his Social Security cheque, police said. Virgilio Cintron (66) had already died of natural causes when two of his friends, both aged 65, brought him to a cheque-cashing store on Tuesday.
Leasing company Awas (Ireland) is expected to announce a deal to buy up to 100 Airbus jets worth $6,9-billion, the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> reported on Wednesday. The news came after aerospace group Boeing said it delivered 441 commercial airplanes in 2007 as part of a tight race with Europe’s Airbus.
Your cellphone is a potential gold mine for marketers: it can reveal where you are, whom you call and even what music you like. Considering the phone is usually no more than a few metres away, these are powerful clues for figuring out just the right moment to deliver the right coupon for the store just around the corner.
A lone trader out to win a little fame made the purchase that took oil prices to the historic level of dollars a barrel this week but he lost on the deal, analysts said. The trader has been named by United States and British media as Richard Arens, who runs a one-man oil brokerage, ABS.
Oil prices vaulted to a record a barrel on Wednesday as violence in Nigeria, tight energy stockpiles and a weaker dollar triggered a surge of speculative buying, dealers said. Oil’s climb to the psychologically key triple-digit price helped send stocks tumbling on Wall Street and further darkened an already gloomy economic outlook in the United States.
More Americans are googling themselves — and many are checking out their friends, co-workers and romantic interests, too. In a report in December, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said 47% of United States adult internet users had looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine.
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/ 27 December 2007
Despite the last-minute shopping frenzy, holiday retail sales were sluggish as the United States consumer spent less than expected while internet shopping slowed down. Many shoppers waited until the last moment to buy gifts for Christmas, as only 18% of Americans had finished their holiday shopping in mid-December.
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/ 26 December 2007
Oscar Peterson’s dazzling keyboard technique, commanding sense of swing and mastery of different piano styles from boogie woogie to bebop could leave even his most accomplished peers awestruck. His death over the weekend brought forth tributes from jazz pianists spanning the generations.
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/ 22 December 2007
The Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to extend the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for a year and demanded that all militias and armed groups in the volatile east lay down their weapons and start disarming. The council asked the UN force ”to attach the highest priority to addressing the crisis”.
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/ 22 December 2007
The Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to wrap up the United Nations peacebuilding mission in Sierra Leone in September next year, praising this year’s peaceful and democratic elections in the West African nation and efforts to professionalise its armed forces.
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/ 20 December 2007
Aid groups urged the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday to set a 30-day deadline for Sudan to stop obstructing the planned January 1 deployment of UN-African Union peacekeepers to Darfur or face sanctions. ”The new hybrid peacekeeping force for Darfur is being set up to fail,” said a statement.
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/ 19 December 2007
The United Nations General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution on Tuesday calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, overcoming protests from a bloc of states that said it undermined their sovereignty. The resolution, which calls for ”a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty,” was passed by a 104 to 54 vote, with 29 abstentions.
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/ 19 December 2007
At least 64 journalists were killed in 2007, making it the deadliest year in more than a decade with Iraq the most dangerous place in the world to report, a United States media watchdog said on Monday. About seven in 10 of the deaths in 2007 were murders, while the rest were combat-related deaths and deaths in dangerous assignments.
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/ 14 December 2007
Just a few blocks from Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, bustling with Christmas shoppers, other New Yorkers are out getting what they need, with one big difference — by not spending any money. For the city’s ”Freegans”, finding bell peppers, apples and bagels in the bags of trash that litter the city’s sidewalks is a way of life.
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/ 8 December 2007
A series of six black-and-white prints on display in an unassuming corner of the New York Public Library have sparked controversy on the airwaves and blogosphere quite out of keeping with the dark, marble-lined corridor in which they are hung. The prints show the mugshots of main members of the Bush administration.
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/ 7 December 2007
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that the new 26 000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur ”is at risk” unless it gets 24 critically needed helicopters and he appealed again to all countries for help. ”While helicopters alone cannot ensure the success of the mission, their absence may well doom it to failure,” Ban said in a letter.
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/ 5 December 2007
The creators of the hit film Borat were sued again on Tuesday, this time by a driving instructor seen in the comedy admonishing the fake Kazakh reporter for yelling insults at other drivers. Michael Psenicska was duped into participating in the film after it was described to him as a ”documentary about the integration of foreign people into the American way of life”.
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/ 3 December 2007
Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in two tests of short-term memory. Overall, the chimps won. That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that ”humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions”, said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University.
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/ 1 December 2007
Oil prices fell back below a barrel on Friday amid speculation that the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) will decide to increase its output at a meeting next week, analysts said. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for January delivery, fell ,03 to close at ,71 per barrel, after earlier striking a one-month low of ,52.