Vivian Hsu - Good Tears, Bad Tears (English Translation)

Yahoo Hires Google to Sell Online Ads

SAN FRANCISCO) — Yahoo has hired Internet search leader Google to sell some online ads in hopes of boosting its profit.

The Sunnyvale-based company announced the plans late Thursday after its stock plunged 10 percent on news that its efforts to revive takeover talks with Microsoft had hit a dead end.

Yahoo Inc. is now counting on Google Inc.'s superior moneymaking system to appease its angry shareholders as it tries to fend off a shareholder mutiny being led by activist investor Carl Icahn.

By using Google's superior advertising technology, Yahoo believes it can boost its annual cash flow by $250 million to $450 million in the first year of the deal.

The partnership could last up to 10 years if it can win antitrust approval.

Picasso Prints Stolen in Brazil

The Police car stop at the outside of museum.

The bandits also took two oil paintings by well-known Brazilian artists Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and Lasar Segall, said Carla Regina, a spokeswoman for the Pinacoteca do Estado museum.

The Picasso prints stolen were "The Painter and the Model" from 1963 and "Minotaur, Drinker and Women" from 1933, according to a statement from the Sao Paulo Secretary of State for Culture, which oversees the museum.

The prints and paintings have a combined value of $612,000, the statement and a museum official said.

About noon, three armed men paid the $2.45 entrance fee and immediately went to the second-floor gallery where the works were being exhibited, bypassing more valuable pieces, authorities said.

"This indicates to us that they probably received an order" to take those specific works, Youssef Abou Chain, head of Sao Paulo's organized crime unit, told reporters at a news conference
(SAO PAULO, Brazil) — Three armed robbers stole two Pablo Picasso prints from an art museum in downtown Sao Paulo on Thursday, the city's second high-profile art theft in less than a year.

The assailants overpowered three unarmed museum guards and grabbed the works, officials said. The robbery took about 10 minutes and the museum was nearly empty at the time.

The assailants took the pieces — frames and all — out of the museum in two bags. The institution has no metal detectors.

In December, Picasso's "Portrait of Suzanne Bloch" and "O Lavrador de Cafe" by Candido Portinari, an influential Brazilian artist, were stolen from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art by three men who used a crowbar and car jack to force open one of the museum's steel doors.

The framed paintings were found Jan. 8, covered in plastic and leaning against a wall in a house on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, South America's largest city.

One of the suspects in that heist — a former TV chef — turned himself over to police in January, who already had two suspects in custody.

How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?

Sleep is one of the richest topics in science today: why we need it, why it can be hard to get, and how that affects everything from our athletic performance to our income. Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, Calif., has looked at the most important question of all. In 2002, he compared death rates among more than 1 million American adults who, as part of a study on cancer prevention, reported their average nightly amount of sleep. To many, his results were surprising, but they've since been corroborated by similar studies in Europe and East Asia. Kripke explains.

Q: How much sleep is ideal?

A: Studies show that people who sleep between 6.5 hr. and 7.5 hr. a night, as they report, live the longest. And people who sleep 8 hr. or more, or less than 6.5 hr., they don't live quite as long. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short. The big surprise is that long sleep seems to start at 8 hr. Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hr..

Morbidity [or sickness] is also "U-shaped" in the sense that both very short sleep and very long sleep are associated with many illnesses—with depression, with obesity—and therefore with heart disease—and so forth. But the [ideal amount of sleep] for different health measures isn't all in the same place. Most of the low points are at 7 or 8 hr., but there are some at 6 hr. and even at 9 hr. I think diabetes is lowest in 7-hr. sleepers [for example]. But these measures aren't as clear as the mortality data.

I think we can speculate [about why people who sleep from 6.5 to 7.5 hr. live longer], but we have to admit that we don't really understand the reasons. We don't really know yet what is cause and what is effect. So we don't know if a short sleeper can live longer by extending their sleep, and we don't know if a long sleeper can live longer by setting the alarm clock a bit earlier. We're hoping to organize tests of those questions.

One of the reasons I like to publicize these facts is that I think we can prevent a lot of insomnia and distress just by telling people that short sleep is O.K. We've all been told you ought to sleep 8 hr., but there was never any evidence. A very common problem we see at sleep clinics is people who spend too long in bed. They think they should sleep 8 or 9 hr., so they spend [that amount of time] in bed, with the result that they have trouble falling asleep and wake up a lot during the night. Oddly enough, a lot of the problem [of insomnia] is lying in bed awake, worrying about it. There have been many controlled studies in the U.S., Great Britain and other parts of Europe that show that an insomnia treatment that involves getting out of bed when you're not sleepy and restricting your time in bed actually helps people to sleep more. They get over their fear of the bed. They get over the worry, and become confident that when they go to bed, they will sleep. So spending less time in bed actually makes sleep better. It is in fact a more powerful and effective long-term treatment for insomnia than sleeping pills.

Harry Potter Prequel Auctioned for Charity

(LONDON) —An 800-word prequel to the Harry Potter series, handwritten by author J.K. Rowling, sold for nearly 25,000 pounds at a charity auction Tuesday

With the winning bid of $48,858, the absent bidder paid more than $59 a word for Rowling's short story during the event at the flagship of Waterstone's book store chain in London. Proceeds will benefit the writers' association English PEN and a dyslexia charity.

A short mystery story by acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard raised $7,816.

Rowling was able to squeeze her Harry Potter prequel onto both sides of a piece of A5 paper, which is slightly bigger than a postcard.

The prequel to the seven-book series is set three years before Harry is born and features the characters Sirius Black and James Potter, Harry's father. They get into trouble with a policeman before escaping with broomsticks, drumsticks and a little bit of magic.

Rowling made it clear there was no hope for a new Potter novel and finished her card by writing, "From the prequel I am not working on — but that was fun!"

Twelve other authors and illustrators also contributed cards to the auction, including Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing and novelists Nick Hornby and Margaret Atwood.

Copies of all the cards will be on display in Waterstone's stores and online following the auction, and they will be collected into a book available in August.

The final installment of Rowling's seven-book Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," was published last year.

Rowling has said she has no plans to write another novel about the boy wizard, but in December she sold a handwritten, leather-bound book of fairy tales she described as drawing on the series' themes for nearly $4 million at auction. The money went to the Children's Voice, a charity she co-founded in 2005.

An Italian Snags the Flatiron

Spurred by the weak dollar and the strong euro, European travelers to the U.S. have been lapping up everything from Gap boxers to iPhones to luxury condos in Palm Beach. Now a top Italian real estate investor has nabbed a crown piece of New York property, a sale that echoes the Japanese purchase of Rockefeller Center in 1989. Valter Mainetti has confirmed to TIME that his company, the Sorgente Group, has acquired a majority share of Manhattan's historic Flatiron building.

Among the first and, at the time, tallest of New York City's signature skyscrapers when it was completed in 1902, the 22-story Flatiron is instantly recognizable for its triangular shape at the intersection of Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and 23rd Street. Though it was dwarfed 30 years later by the Empire State building, 11 blocks up Fifth Avenue, the Flatiron is a favorite of architecture buffs and a lasting star in the skyline, featured in the opening credits of the David Letterman show and serving as the fictional headquarters for the Daily Bugle in the recent Spider-Man movies. It has been a National Historic Landmark since 1989. Though not quite the shock of the Mitsubishi Group's purchase of Rockefeller Center, the Flatiron's falling into foreign hands nevertheless carries symbolic weight as international investors take advantage of the upheaval in the real estate market and weakness of the U.S. dollar. The euro closed Monday at $1.56.

As bad as the U.S. housing bust has been, the falloff in sales has been cushioned by foreign buyers in such places as New York City and Florida. Anne Marie Moriarty, a vice president of Corcoran realtors, says residential real estate sales to foreigners have doubled in the past 15 months. The uptick in foreign interest helps explain why New York real estate prices are up 11% from last year in an otherwise tanking marketplace. "It's bucking the trend," says Moriarity of the Manhattan market. "[Foreigners] see it as a long-term investment. Part of it for them is owning a piece of New York."

Similar thinking is behind Mainetti's purchase. He has been building his Michelangelo Fund around investments in so-called "trophy" properties, which have historical or architectural value beyond the typical calculus of location and square footage. In 2005, he bought a 27% stake in the company that owns the Chrysler Building. A year later he acquired a minority share in the Flatiron, which today is valued at a total of $180 million. With the latest deal, he now holds a 53% share of the famous building. "The Flatiron is expensive, but with the [cheap] dollar, it made sense to increase our share," said Mainetti. "The stability of the New York real estate market is unique. This current crisis will pass, and the dollar will reestablish itself. We are confident."

Foreign companies were the buyers in four of the top 13 U.S. commercial real estate deals in 2007, according to Real Estate Alert newsletter. Another foreign acquisition of notable Manhattan real estate was the Dubai-based Jumeirah group's 2006 purchase of the Essex House on Central Park South.

Michael Seton, a managing director in the New York office of German-based property lender Eurohypo AG, said foreigners view the U.S. market as a long-term investment. "They're less rattled by the subprime crisis and short-term gyrations in the market," Seton explains. "Their horizon is longer, which in the end is good for the real estate business. These are properties that are meant to be held onto." The new Italian owners of the Flatiron say they're in for the long haul, and plan to seek city approval for a new project to illuminate the exterior by Vittorio Storaro, the Oscar-winning director of photography for Apocalypse Now and Little Buddha. Just a touch more glamor, perhaps, for the real-life publishing company employees who occupy its offices — not to mention Peter Parker and his Daily Bugle colleagues

Were African-Americans at Iwo Jima?

Sixty-three years after U.S. forces vanquished the Japanese and planted their flag on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, the remote outpost in the Volcano Islands is the focus of another pitched battle. This time, acclaimed film directors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are engaging in verbal warfare over the verisimilitude of Eastwood's two films about the epic clash, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Lee has claimed that by soft-pedaling African-American contributions to the battle, Eastwood is misrepresenting history.

"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said at the Cannes Film Festival. "In his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist." Eastwood's counter: "Has he ever studied history? [African-American soldiers] didn't raise the flag," he said. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, they'd say, "This guy's lost his mind.'" Eastwood also told Lee to "shut his face," prompting Lee to amplify the racism charge: "[Eastwood] is not my father and we're not on a plantation, either," he fumed. "I'm not making this up. I know history."

History, as it turns out, is on both their sides. Lee is correct that African-Americans played an instrumental role in World War II, in which more than 1 million black servicemen helped defeat the Axis Powers. Those efforts include significant contributions to the fight for Iwo Jima. An estimated 700 to 900 African-American soldiers participated in the epic island battle, many of whom were Marines trained in segregated boot camps at Montford Point, within Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Those soldiers were restricted from front-line combat duty, but they played integral noncombat roles. Under enemy fire, they piloted amphibious truck units during perilous shore landings, unloaded and shuttled ammunition to the front lines, helped bury the dead, and weathered Japanese onslaughts on their positions even after the island had been declared secure. According to Christopher Moore, the author of a book about African-Americans' myriad contributions during World War II, "thousands" more helped fashion the airstrips from which U.S. B-29 aircrafts could launch and return from air assaults on Tokyo, about 760 miles northwest. Hosting that air base, Moore says, was Iwo Jima's primary strategic importance.

Eastwood's portrayal of the specific battle is, if narrow, also essentially accurate. Flags Of Our Fathers zeroes in on the soldiers who hoisted the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, and this task, memorialized in a famous staged photograph, was accomplished by five white servicemen and a sixth, Ira Hayes, of Pima Indian descent. (His other entry in the Iwo Jima category, Letters from Iwo Jima, is told largely from the perspective of Japanese soldiers.)

Eastwood is also correct that black soldiers represented a small fraction of the total force deployed on the island. That argument doesn't placate Yvonne Latty, a New York University professor and author of a book about African-American veterans. Black soldiers "had the most dangerous job," she says. "If you were going to show the soldiers' landing, you'd need to show [African-Americans] on the beach." In Flags of Our Fathers, which shows the landing in significant detail, African-Americans appear only in fleeting cutaway shots and in a photograph during the film's closing credits.

Moore lauds Eastwood's rendering of the battle, but laments the limited role accorded to African-Americans. "Without black labor," he says, "we would've seen a much different ending to the war."