The Yahoo logo is displayed outside of the offices in Santa Clara, Calif. — Photo AP

NEW YORK: Yahoo!’s board has approved a deal to purchase the popular blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

The deal, if confirmed, would be the largest for Yahoo! since Marissa Mayer took over as chief executive last year and could help the struggling Internet pioneer regain traction with younger Internet users.

Neither Yahoo! nor Tumblr commented on the report. But Mayer has scheduled a news conference in New York on Monday at which the company said it will unveil “something special.”Yahoo! has been looking at a range of acquisitions since Mayer took over as chief executive last year and vowed to revive the company, which has faded in the face of competition from Google.

Tumblr could be key to Yahoo!’s strategy because of its popularity with younger Internet users. A survey this year conducted by the online data group Survata found Tumblr more popular than Facebook among those aged 13 to 25.

While Tumblr generates very little cash, bringing it in the Yahoo! family could offer the potential for new advertising and other revenue sources.

Douglas McIntyre, analyst at 24/7 Wall Street, said the deal “looks too rich” for a company that has only generated a reported $15 million in annual revenues.

“If Yahoo! cannot significantly lift Tumblr sales, the deal will be a bust,” McIntyre said. “It is worth keeping in mind that Yahoo! is struggling to increase its own revenue.”Trip Chowdhry at Global Equities Research said the deal could make sense if Yahoo! creates incentives for the Tumblr team.

“They have a very difficult time recruiting smart engineers,” Chowdhry said.

“They need the team committed to stay at least four years. So the deal should be cash and stock. Cash is bad because it creates no incentives for Tumblr employees. An asset means nothing if the talent leaves.”Founded in 2007 and headquartered in New York, Tumblr says it has more than 108 million blogs, 50 billion postings in 12 languages and 175 employees. The website ranking site Alexa lists Tumblr as number 32 in terms of global popularity.

The Journal said Yahoo’s board unanimously approved the deal in a meeting by telephone on Friday and that it could be announced Monday.

According to the technology website AllThingsD, which is part of the Journal’s parent company, Tumblr founder and chief executive David Karp will get a large cash windfall and also stay at Yahoo! for four years, retaining control over the service.
Yahoo! recently failed in a bid to take over the online video site Dailymotion after the French government, which owns a stake, quashed the deal.

The California firm is now reported to be interested in another video website, Hulu.

Mayer is seeking to help Yahoo! regain its former glory, by emphasizing social media and mobile Internet.

Tumblr has grow into one of the most popular social media sites, but has also been dogged by copyright issues.
Tumblr got a round of funding in 2011 worth $85 million that reportedly valued the operation at $800 million.

Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners led the 2011 investment round, which included infusions of cash from former News Corp executive Peter Chernin’s investment business and billionaire Richard Branson.

Karp is a New York native who dropped out of Bronx High School of Science at age 15, according to the technology website TechCrunch’s Crunchbase. He is now 26.

Free Syrian Army fighters prepare to launch a rocket in Deir al-Zor. The text on the wall reads “Yes”.-Reuters Photo

DAMASCUS: Syrian troops entered the centre of the rebel stronghold of Qusayr on Sunday, seizing the town’s main square and its municipality building, a military source said.

“The Syrian army controls Qusayr’s main square in the centre of the city, and the surrounding buildings, including the municipality building,” the source told AFP.

“Our valiant troops have restored security and stability to the Qusayr municipality building and surrounding buildings and are continuing to hunt down terrorists in the town,” state television said.

The Syrian regime uses the term “terrorists” to describe those seeking the departure of President Bashar al-Assad.

His regime has made the recapture of Qusayr, in central Homs province, a key objective, in part because of the town’s strategic location between the capital Damascus and the coast.

In recent weeks, regime forces have been bolstered in Qusayr by fighters from Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a staunch Assad ally.

-File Photo

KABUL: Taliban attacks killed at least ten Afghan police on Sunday, officials said, in the latest violence against the force which is due to take more security responsibility from Nato troops before their withdrawal next year.

In one of the incidents, Taliban fighters attacked a security check post in the Muqur district of Ghazni province in southern Afghanistan, killing six police, according to district governor.

“Six of our local police were martyred after hours of clash with Taliban when they attacked their post early today,” he said.
He added a second attack on a local police check post in Muqur wounded four police.

The victims were members of the 18,000-strong Afghan Local Police, a village-level force formed in 2010 to provide security in areas where the better-trained national police and army are scarce.

Also on Sunday, four Afghan border police were killed when their vehicle was blown up by a roadside bomb in eastern Nangarhar province that borders neighbouring Pakistan.

“Today at around 10:00 am, a border police pickup truck hit a roadside bomb while on patrol in Mohamand Dara district of Nangarhar province,” Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, Nangarhar provincial governor spokesman told AFP.

“As a result of the blast, four border police were killed.” he said.

A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for both attacks saying at least two local officers were among the dead in Ghazni.

Afghan security forces are increasingly on the front line against the insurgents, and suffering heavier casualties, as Nato combat troops prepare to withdraw by the end of next year.

Director and publisher Gottfried Wagner, grand-grandson of German composer Richard Wagner, gestures during an interview on May 6, 2013 in Cologne, Germany. — Photo AFP

BAYREUTH: Opera houses the world over are scrambling to pay tribute to Richard Wagner, the controversial German composer often referred to as Hitler’s favourite, who would have turned 200 this year.

More has purportedly already been written about Wagner than any other artist and composer in history, but publishers are churning out countless new biographies, critical studies and books.

Magazines and daily newspapers are bursting with reviews, interviews and articles, while a plethora of new and re-issued recordings jostle for attention.

In the run-up to this week’s bicentenary, all the world’s leading opera houses — including the Met in New York, Covent Garden in London, La Scala in Milan, the Bastille in Paris and Vienna State Opera — have unveiled new stagings of Wagner’s opus magnum, the 16-hour-long, four-opera “Ring” cycle.

In Germany, which boasts around 80 opera houses, even the most dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerian would struggle to keep track.
Among the more outlandish projects is a staging of “Rhinegold” on a barge on the river Rhine.

But for true Wagnerians, perhaps the main highlights of the year take place in Bayreuth, the small, sleepy town in Franconia where Wagner designed and built his Festspielhaus, and which remains the centre of the ardent cult around him.

The hallowed theatre with its incomparable acoustics usually only opens its doors for four weeks in the summer.

But on May 22, it will host Wagner’s 200th birthday concert, with German maestro Christian Thielemann conducting excerpts from his best-known operas.

Then the centrepiece of this year’s Bayreuth Festival, which begins on July 25, will be a hotly anticipated new production of the “Ring” by the deconstructivist and iconoclastic German theatre director, Frank Castorf.

As always with Wagner, the bicentenary celebrations are never far from controversy.

In Duesseldorf this month, a new staging of his “Tannhaeuser” ended in an eclat, when director Burkhard Kosminski set the composer’s story of the medieval knight-minstrel in the Nazi era and included a graphic portrayal of the gassing and execution of Jews.

After unprecedented protests, the opera house pulled the production after just one performance.

But the incident goes to the heart of the controversy surrounding a composer who is reviled as much as he is revered.

“I hate Wagner, but I hate him on my knees,” the legendary Jewish maestro Leonard Bernstein once said of Wagner, succinctly summing up the deep ambivalence many people tend to harbour towards him.

Opera that inspired Hitler

Wagner was born in Leipzig on May 22, 1813 and died in Venice on February 13, 1883, long before the rise of Nazism.
But Hitler was an ardent admirer of his music, as well as a regular visitor to Bayreuth. And he became a close friend of the Wagner family, who affectionately called him “Uncle Wolf”.

Hitler claimed that it was one of Wagner’s early operas, about the Roman tribune “Rienzi”, which inspired him to begin thinking about a political career.

The Nazis made prodigious use of Wagner’s music in their propaganda films and rallies, so much so that the composer’s works are still banned for performance in Israel.

Music scholars, historians, musicians and conductors still fiercely debate the extent to which Wagner’s musical and artistic legacy is impregnated with anti-Semitism, misogyny and proto-Nazi ideas of racial purity.

In addition to his 13 completed operas, Wagner was a prolific writer and theorist, and among his most infamous publications is a virulently anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled “Judaism in Music”.

The bone of contention for his supporters and detractors alike is whether Wagner’s “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or total work of art, is innately apolitical, or whether he uses it to propagate his racist, anti-Semitic and nihilistic worldview.

In purely musical terms, Wagner’s achievements are undeniable.

His medieval love epic, “Tristan and Isolde” and his final stage work “Parsifal” broke the boundaries of tonality, influencing the work of a wealth of later composers including Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg.

Wagner’s use of the orchestra, with exotic new instruments specially designed to his own demands, was similarly revolutionary.
But critics, such as the composer’s great-grandson, Gottfried Wagner, said the man cannot and should not be separated from his art.

Iranians surf the net at a cyber cafe in Tehran.—Photo by AFP

TEHRAN: IRAN is reportedly tightening internet controls ahead of next month’s presidential election, mindful of violent protests inspired last time around over claims of fraud.

Authorities deny such allegations but have not explained exactly why service has become slower.

Businesses, banks and even state organisations aren’t being spared the widespread disruption, local media say.

“The internet is in a coma,” the Ghanoon daily reports.

“It only happens in Iran: the election comes, the internet goes,” it said, quoting a recent tweet in Farsi.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and numerous other sites, including thousands of Western ones, have been censored in Iran since massive street demonstrations following the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

Those protests – stifled by a heavy-handed crackdown that led to numerous arrests and even deaths – were instigated online and observers say authorities are choking the internet to prevent a recurrence.

One DVD vendor, who sells illegal copies of Western movies downloaded online, said “you can forget about downloading stuff; the bandwidth drops every other minute”.

A network supervisor at a major internet service provider in Tehran said his company had been unable to address complaints about slower speeds, particularly accessing pages using the HTTPS secure communications protocol.

“Browsing (the net) is difficult due to the low speed. Even checking emails is a pain,” he said.

The problem is not limited to slower speeds, but also affects what people can actually access.

Earlier this month, an Iranian IT website reported that the last remaining software enabling users to bypass filters imposed on net traffic “has become practically inaccessible”.

Among such software is the virtual private network (VPN), which lets people circumvent the filtering of websites.

VPN uses certain protocols to connect to servers outside Iran. In that way, the computer appears to be based in another country and bypasses the filters.

Blocking these protocols could theoretically contribute to slower speeds.

Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, head of the parliamentary communications committee, said VPN was blocked in early March, which has contributed to slowing the internet, media reported.

He did not elaborate.

Authorities refuse to officially confirm the new restraints, but former officials and media reports have accused the Supreme Council of Cyberspace of ordering them.

Iran is preparing to elect a new president on June 14.

Dutt, 53, surrendered on Thursday to serve out the remaining three-and-a-half years of a five-year term in a case linked to deadly 1993 Mumbai bombings.

Dutt’s lawyer, Rizwan Merchant, has demanded the transfer of the actor whom he said was being kept in the cell once occupied by Mumbai attacks gunman Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, according to the Indian Express daily newspaper.

Pakistani-born Kasab was executed last November, nearly four years after 166 people died in a three-day rampage in the Indian metropolis.

The steel bunker specially built for Kasab at Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail had no ventilation and the actor could not even tell if it was day or night, the lawyer said.

“He (Dutt) is not a terrorist” and should not be kept in such a cell, the lawyer was quoted as saying.

There was no immediate comment available from the jail.

The actor, whose parents were two of India’s biggest stars, shot to fame in the 1980s in a string of action movies in which he performed his own stunts, earning him the nickname “Deadly Dutt”.

He was convicted in 2006 of possessing guns supplied by gangsters who staged the 1993 bomb attacks that killed 257 people but was freed on bail after serving 18 months in prison. In March, the Supreme Court upheld Dutt’s conviction.

He was cleared in 2007 of more serious conspiracy charges in the blasts, believed staged by Muslim underworld leaders in revenge for religious riots in which mainly Muslims died after the razing of an ancient mosque by Hindu zealots.

Dutt, whose mother was Muslim and father Hindu, was found guilty of possession of an automatic rifle and a pistol which he insisted were only meant to protect his family in Mumbai’s charged atmosphere following the mosque’s destruction.

After the Supreme Court upheld his conviction, the father-of-three wept and declared himself “a shattered man”.

A Chinese rocket takes off with the Venezuelan earth observation satellite Miranda in Jiuquan, northwest China on September 29, 2012. — AFP Photo

BEIJING – Pakistan is set to become the fifth Asian country to use China’s domestic satellite navigation system which was launched as a rival to the US global positioning system, a report said Saturday.

The Beidou, or Compass, system started providing services to civilians in the region in December and is expected to provide global coverage by 2020. It also has military applications.

Thailand, China, Laos and Brunei already use the Chinese system, which currently consists of 16 operational satellites, with 30 more due to join the system, according to English-language China Daily.

Huang Lei, international business director of BDStar Navigation, which promotes Beidou, told the newspaper that the company would build a network of stations in Pakistan to enhance the location accuracy of Beidou.

He said building the network would cost tens of millions of dollars.

American website Defensenews.com reported early May that Pakistani military experts were in favour of using the Chinese system, even though the availability of the signal could not be guaranteed in case of conflict.

But according to one of them, Pakistan cannot place its trust in the United States.

“Pakistan’s armed forces cannot rely on US GPS because of its questionable availability during a conflict that has overtones of nuclear escalation,” former Pakistan Air Force pilot Kaiser Tufail told the site.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang travels next week to Pakistan, a long time ally, after a visit to India.