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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stephen Colbert, whose U.S. presidential campaign was cut short, came out a winner on Tuesday when he walked away with a Webby award as the Internet's "Person of the Year."

The Webby awards, which honor excellence on the Internet, are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-person judging academy. Winners will be honored at ceremonies on June 9th and 10th in New York, and, as always, will be limited to just a five-word acceptance speech.

Colbert won the highest honor for "the innovative way he has used the Internet to interact with fans of The Colbert Report."

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BERLIN: Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone operator, and Telecom Italia Mobile, the leader in the Italian cellphone market, said they had reached agreements with Apple to sell the multimedia telephone. Vodafone also said it would sell the iPhone in nine other countries: the Czech Republic, Greece, Portugal, India, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

"It was going to be difficult for Apple to continue on an exclusivity basis," said Carolina Milanesi, the research director for mobile devices at Gartner in London. "Opening up to more operators will widen their addressable market and therefore their overall sales potential."

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SYDNEY: "Vodafone Australia is enormously pleased to be included in the agreement to sell the iPhone to our customers later this year," Vodafone chief executive Russell Hewitt said.

"The iPhone has already proved to be extremely popular with customers in other parts of the world and Vodafone is confident that today's announcement will be well received by all Australians who are keen to get their hands on their own iPhone."

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Photos courtesy of AP and Reuters

"YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Myanmar's official media said Tuesday that 10,000 people were killed by a cyclone in just one town, confirming fears of a spiraling death toll from the storm's 12-foot tidal surges and high winds that swept away bamboo homes in low-lying coastal regions... Fishing boats were crushed by the tropical cyclone in the port of Yangon, Myanmar, on Sunday. Winds reached 120 miles per hour."

Images courtesy of Associated Press

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"Records stretching back to 1960 prove what climate models had predicted: warmer oceans contain less oxygen. Oceanographer Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany and his colleagues report in Science that an analysis of historical records and recent samples show that as the globe has warmed, waters with low oxygen content have expanded in the tropical Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans.

"The oxygen concentrations in these oxygen-minimum zones have decreased with time," says oceanographer and study coauthor Gregory C. Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash. "The regions of low oxygen have also expanded vertically by both extending deeper into the ocean and closer to the surface."

Fish and other sea life cannot survive in such waters—and this expansion reduces the area where fish can thrive, says oceanographer Janet Sprintall of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who also coauthored the study. She notes that fisheries may be affected as well."

Image courtesy of Scientific American

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Microsoft has decided to withdraw its three-month-old offer to buy Yahoo, as expressed in a formal letter from Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer to Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang.

"The companies had finally engaged in merger talks this week and appeared closer than ever to a deal Friday, but they still remained billions of dollars apart in their assessment of Yahoo's worth. Ballmer said today that the company had raised its buyout price to $33 a share from the initial $31 offered, which added $5 billion to the deal that was initially worth $44.6 billion.

That would have represented a 70% premium over Yahoo's closing stock price on Jan. 31, the night that Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft made its unsolicited offer.

But in recent talks Yahoo had insisted on receiving at least $5 billion more than that, or at least $37 a share, which Microsoft was unwilling to pay, Ballmer wrote in a letter to Yang.

Ballmer said he had decided against launching a hostile bid for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, including trying to take control of the company's board and offering the deal directly to shareholders. He said Yahoo had signaled that it would take action that could prolong such a proxy fight and make the company less valuable to Microsoft, including striking a partnership with Google Inc. in which the search giant would deliver ads alongside many of Yahoo's search results."

Image courtesy of The Los Angeles Times

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"SEATTLE — West Coast ports were shut down on Thursday as thousands of longshoremen failed to report for work, part of what their union leaders said was a one-day, one-shift protest against the war in Iraq.

Cranes and forklifts stood still from Seattle to San Diego, and ships were stalled at sea as workers held rallies up and down the coast to blame the war for distracting public attention and money from domestic needs like health care and education.

“We’re loyal to America, and we won’t stand by while our country, our troops and our economy are being destroyed by a war that’s bankrupting us to the tune of $3 trillion,” the president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Bob McEllrath, said in a written statement. “It’s time to stand up, and we’re doing our part today.”

About 25,000 union members are employed at 29 West Coast ports, but the protest took place only during the day shift. A spokesman for the main West Coast employers’ group, the Pacific Maritime Association, said it appeared that about 6,000 workers did not show up for work, which meant that about 10,000 containers would not be loaded or unloaded from about 30 cargo ships."

Image courtesy of The New York Times

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"The Bush Administration has praised Canada's conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, for his commitment to the war. But its toll has unnerved Canadian citizens and opposition leaders. A recent poll showed that 47% of Canadians wanted their soldiers to leave Afghanistan immediately, and only 17% supported maintaining a combat role.

The Afghan war had broad public support in Canada in 2002, but is now seen as one front in George W. Bush's hugely unpopular "war on terror." The discontent also has deeper roots.

Perhaps most important, Canadians do not see the Afghan conflict as directly relevant to their own security. Al-Qaeda has never staged an attack on Canadian soil…Canadians worry that fighting alongside the U.S. will increase--not decrease--the risk that they will become a target. "

Images courtesy of Time

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