TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's government says it has released four relatives of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani (hah-SHEH'-mee rahf-sahn-JAHN'-ee), but continues to detain his daughter. Last week, state television showed her speaking to hundreds of opposition supporters. State radio reports after the appearance, hard-line students accused the daughter of 1 of the country's most powerful men of treason.
Pushing the App Store price envelope
For people who had been waiting since January to watch TV on their iPhones, price doesn’t seem to have been an object.
Within a day of its release Wednesday, SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone had shot to the No. 10 spot on Apple’s (AAPL) closely watched Top Paid Apps list.
The $29.99 program, which communicates wirelessly with Sling Media’s video streaming Slingbox to display TV programming on the screens of iPhones and iPod touches, is the most expensive application to have ever climbed that high.
By Friday morning, SlingPlayer had dropped to No. 12, but it was still the only app among the top 100 bestsellers listed for more than $9.99 — a price point that, until now, seemed to be the upper limit for iPhone bestsellers.
According to Jeff Scott, editor of 148Apps.biz, the closest any other high-priced apps had come to No. 10 were Jaadu VNC ($24.99), which made it to No. 19 in September 2008, and LogMeIn Ignition ($29.99), which hit No. 74 last December.
The vast majority of sales on the App Store are much smaller. Of the 38,356 applications currently active, according to 148Apps.biz’s stats,
- 23.4% are free
- 67% cost less than $1
- and 97% cost less than $10
SlingPlayer for the iPhone, which was first demoed at Macworld in January, has been available for months on a variety of other mobile devices, including certain BlackBerry (RIMM), Palm (PALM), Nokia (NOK) and Windows Mobile (MSFT) smartphones.
But it never got the kind of attention on those devices as it has on the iPhone. See, for example, the fuss stirred up this week when reporters discovered that the iPhone version worked only on Wi-Fi, and not over AT&T’s (T) cellular networks.
A spokesman for EchoStar (SATS), which owns Sling Media, declined to release sales figures. But applications in the top 10 paid apps list have been known to sell hundreds of thousands of units.
Market Cap: $113.5 billion
P/E Ratio: 16
Earnings Growth: 9%
Dividend Yield: 3.4%
While Coke's profits hinge on several variables, including commodity costs and currency, its overarching story -- international expansion -- makes it a stable option. "Eighty percent of their earnings now come from beverages sold outside of the U.S.," says Gentry Lee, an analyst at Fayez Sarofim & Co. "As per capita consumption increases around the world, Coke will benefit."
One lingering question is whether the company should follow Pepsi's tack and attempt to acquire its bottler, Coca-Cola Enterprises. Coke's formerly contentious relationship with its bottler has improved, but the jury is still out on whether or not it should take the purchasing plunge. "There are plusses and minuses to merging," says Lee. "Coke has a different relationship with its bottler, so the rationale isn't the same."
Google confirms U.S. antitrust inquiry
The search engine says regulators are looking into the company's deal with publishers to make book content available online.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Google Inc. has received formal notice from the Justice Department that antitrust investigators are looking into its settlement with publishers that would help make millions of books available online.
Asked if the company had received the civil equivalent of a subpoena, Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond told reporters: "Yeah, we did."
The Justice Department's antitrust division has also sent formal information requests to Lagardere's Hachette Book Group and another publisher, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Under a proposed settlement last October between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, Google agreed to pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers can register works and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions or book sales.
Google's plan is to let readers to search millions of copyrighted books online, browse passages and purchase copies.
Drummond said he expected the federal court assessing the settlement and the Justice Department to work parallel to each other.
"It's a separate question from the approval of the class action settlement," Drummond said. "The judge's job is not to review every question that the Department of Justice might think about."
He also acknowledged the possibility that the agreement might be tweaked, if necessary. "We're open to that sort of thing ... if it's a compelling argument. We haven't heard it," he said.
Two experts on digitization told Reuters in April that the Justice Department was making inquiries about the settlement. U.S. states attorneys general have also made inquiries, an expert told Reuters.
Google is also part of a Justice Department probe into possible pacts by big tech businesses not to poach one another's talent.
Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) and Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), computer and music player maker Apple (APPL) and biotech company Genentech, now owned by Roche Holding AG, have received notices that the Justice Department has a formal probe under way, according to the source, who declined to be identified because the investigation is ongoing.
The Federal Trade Commission, which also has antitrust responsibilities, has a probe into Google and Apple Inc's overlapping board members.
The Justice Department probes are evidence that its antitrust division under new chief Christine Varney will be more aggressive than President George W. Bush's antitrust team.
In a speech last month laying out her antitrust philosophy, Varney pledged a more aggressive approach to dealing with dominant companies that use their market power to crush competition and lamented a lack of recent scrutiny of mergers by companies in the same supply chainChrysler and Fiat deal
 The deal paves the way for Chrysler to emerge from bankruptcy |
Fiat and Chrysler have completed the strategic alliance that will put Chrysler's good assets into a new firm.
Fiat chief executive Sergio Marchionne will take control of the new company, which will begin operating immediately.
Fiat is not paying any money for its 20% of the new firm but will contribute technology to make smaller Chryslers.
The deal was completed on Wednesday after the US Supreme Court dismissed an appeal against it from three Indiana state pension and construction funds.
"This is a very significant day, not only for Chrysler and its dedicated employees, who have persevered through a great deal of uncertainty during the past year, but for the global automotive industry as a whole," said Mr Marchionne.
The deal paves the way for Chrysler to emerge from bankruptcy protection.
Debt problems
Fiat's shareholding will expand to 35% if certain targets are met.
The United Auto Workers union gets 55% of the new company, while the US and Canadian governments will take stakes of 8% and 2% respectively.
The pension funds, which hold about $42m (£26.3m) of Chrysler's $6.9bn in secured loans, were opposed to the sale, saying it inverted usual bankruptcy practice by paying unsecured creditors, such as the union, ahead of secured lenders.
Chrysler filed for bankruptcy protection on 30 April, suffering from depleted sales, huge debts and crippling labour, pension and healthcare costs.
Closed dealerships
The new Chrysler will still have its headquarters in the US state of Michigan and will produce Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge branded vehicles and Mopar spare parts.
As part of the creation of the new Chysler, 789 franchised dealers have either closed down or stopped selling new Chrysler vehicles.
The factories that have been temporarily closed during the bankruptcy process should be resuming production shortly.
"Those Chrysler operations assumed by the new company that were idled during this process will soon be back up and running, and work is already underway on developing new environmentally friendly, fuel-efficient, high-quality vehicles that we intend to become Chrysler's hallmark going forward," Mr Marchionne said.
The Obama administration backed the tie-up with Fiat, arguing that Chrysler had been unable to operate independently since it was spun off by the German carmaker Daimler.
Jackson sued over reunion concert
 |
A promoter is suing Michael Jackson for $40m (£24.4m) for allegedly breaching a contract to play a reunion concert in the US with other family members.
Allgood Entertainment claims it made a deal in November with Jackson's then-manager to produce the gig this summer.
It says the deal called for Jackson not to perform elsewhere before the event or for at least three months after it.
He will play 50 dates at London's O2 arena from July. Promoter AEG will not comment while Jackson was unavailable.
Allgood say the concert would have involved the singer, sister Janet, and the other members of The Jackson 5 - Marlon, Jackie, Tito and Jermaine.
Compensation hope
In legal papers filed in Manhattan, Allgood accuse the singer and manager Frank DiLeo of breaking the contract by signing up to do the O2 shows.
AEG is also named in the papers.
The papers add that AEG knew of the agreement between AllGood, DiLeo and Jackson, "but due to their dominance and power in the live performance industry, coerced and/or induced DiLeo and Jackson to disregard the agreements with AllGood and to work with it instead".
"We've given Michael Jackson and AEG every opportunity, publicly and privately, to resolve this matter and to date we have not heard from anyone," said Patrick Allocco, a managing partner for Allgood.
Allgood's lawyer Ira Meyerowitz said the company was not looking to stop Jackson from performing at the O2.
"What we're looking for is for our clients to be involved in the London concerts or be compensated for agreements they entered into," he said.
A spokesman for AEG said the company would not comment on pending litigation.
Air France Flight 447 was a scheduled commercial flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France, that crashed on 1 June 2009 over the Atlantic Ocean with the confirmed loss of all 228 crew members and passengers onboard.
The aircraft, an Air France Airbus A330-200, took off on 31 May 2009 at 19:03 local time (22:03 UTC).
The last contact with the crew was a routine message to Brazilian air traffic controllers at 01:33 UTC, as the aircraft approached the edge of Brazilian radar surveillance over the Atlantic Ocean, en-route to Senegalese-controlled airspace off the coast of West Africa.
Forty minutes later, a four-minute-long series of automatic radio messages was received from the plane, indicating numerous problems and warnings.
The exact meanings of these messages are still under investigation, but the aircraft is believed to have been lost shortly after it sent the automated messages.
After the aircraft failed to contact air traffic control on either continent, a search and rescue operation was initiated.
On 6 June, two bodies and debris from the aircraft were found 680 mi (1,090 km) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast.
The debris included a briefcase containing an airline ticket, later confirmed to have been issued for the flight.
39 more bodies have been found since, bringing the total number of confirmed fatalities to 41.
This accident is the deadliest in the history of Air France, surpassing the crash of an Air France charter flight from Paris-Orly Airport to Atlanta on 3 June 1962, and the airline's first fatal crash since Air France Flight 4590 in July 2000.
Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile (BEA, Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety), described it as the worst accident in French aviation history.
It was also the first accident in commercial service resulting in fatalities in the 16-year operating history of the Airbus A330.
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