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Avatar smashes $1bn box office speed record
AdvertisementWatch a scene from the blockbuster - Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
Avatar has become the fastest movie ever to achieve $1bn (£625.6m) in ticket sales around the world.

Distributors 20th Century Fox say it has earned more than $350m (£217m) in the US and more than $670m (£415m) in the rest of the world in only 17 days.

The 3D science fiction blockbuster was directed by James Cameron, who also made Titanic, the best selling movie of all time.

The latest figures make Avatar already the fourth-biggest film ever made.

Ahead of it are Titanic ($1.8bn; £1.1bn), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($1.12bn; £695m) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($1.07bn; £664m).

Avatar - about a disabled marine who infiltrates a race of giant blue aliens - combines live action with digitally-enhanced performances.

It was reportedly the most expensive film ever made, with a budget of at least $300m (£186m).

Expensive tickets

"This is like a freight train out of control," said 20th Century Fox distribution executive Bert Livingston. "It just keeps on going.

"I think everybody has to see Avatar once, even people who don't normally go to the movies, they've heard about it and are saying, 'I have to see it'," he said.

"Then there are those people seeing it multiple times."

Avatar has now reached most parts of the globe. It opened in China on Saturday and is due to reach Italy - its final market - on 15 January.

The huge box office takings are partly down to the higher cost of tickets for 3D performances, says the BBC's Peter Bowes in Los Angeles.

But as Hollywood enters its traditional slow season, with few big films due for release, Avatar is likely to dominate the box office for several more weeks, he adds.

Dokdo, unequivocally Korean

Geographically, Dokdo is located 87.4 km from Ulleungdo (Korea) but 157.5km from the Oki Islands (Japan). Dokdo is visible to the naked eye from Ulleungdo, but not from the Oki Islands.


[Map of Dokdo’s surrounding areas]

[View of Dokdo from Ulleungdo]

Historically, Korea has been aware of Dokdo’s existence since the 6th century. Japan, on the other hand, had not known about Dokdo until the 17th century. There are also a number of Japanese historical records and old maps in which Japan itself acknowledges that Dokdo is not its territory.

[Daijō-kan Order]
[Mangi Yoram]

From the standpoint of international law, the Korean Empire legally proclaimed Dokdo as its territory, stipulating in its Imperial Decree No. 41 (1900) that Dokdo is under the jurisdiction of Ulleungdo. Japan’s Shiname Prefecture later illegally incorporated Dokdo into its territory by issuing Notice No. 40 (1905).


[Korean Imperial Decree No. 41]

[scapin677]

“East Sea” is a geographical designation used by Koreans for over 2,000 years. Unfortunately, however, the use of “Sea of Japan” became widespread in the international community starting in and around the Japanese colonial period, and this erroneous usage persists to date. That is why we are trying to reclaim the correct geographical name “East Sea” for the waters of Dokdo.


[Samguk Sagi]
[Gwanggaeto Stele]

Unequivocally, Dokdo in the East Sea is the rightful territory of the Republic of Korea, geographically, historically, and from the standpoint of international law.

Nuclear refocused

If President Obama is correct that—as he said in Prague last year, and his Nuclear Posture Review repeated a week ago—the risk of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon is now the greatest threat facing the United States, the Washington "nuclear security summit" this week is arguably far more important than the New START treaty he signed last week with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. New START takes modest steps to wind down a standoff that, hopefully, belongs to history. Nuclear terrorism, by contrast, is a new threat that the international community simply isn't organized to confront. The gathering of 47 world leaders in Washington to discuss this suggests everyone is beginning to realize it. Obama's challenge will be to translate unease into action.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/236245

Apple, as Big as Google?
The company's strong earnings puts it neck-and-neck with the tech world's other behemoth.

Revenues were $8.34 billion, up 12 percent. Net profit was $1.23 billion, or $1.35 per share. Analysts had been looking for $1.18 per share, and Apple had guided them even lower—to just below a dollar. The stock traded up on the news at $151, putting Apple's market cap at $135 billion—neck-and-neck with Google.

The results confirm what anyone with a pair of eyes and half a brain can see already—this is a company that is firing on all cylinders, cranking out some of the best products in the industry and making very few mistakes.


The new version of the iPhone has been a smash hit, as were its predecessors. Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones in the last quarter, a 626 percent jump from 717,000 units one year ago. Apple's App Store has delivered 1.5 billion downloads to iPhone owners in just one year. Indeed, the iPhone has gone beyond success and has achieved the status of a cultural phenomenon. You almost feel sorry for everyone else in the mobile phone space. It's that bad. Or good, depending on your perspective.

In a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook compared the 65,000 applications in the Apple App Store to the 2,000 or less for Research in Motion and Nokia, and less than 5,000 for Google's Android platform. "We feel really good about our competitive position and continue to believe we are years ahead of other people," Cook said.

Sales of Macintosh computers were strong too, perhaps thanks to a bit of a price cut that Apple introduced during the quarter. Apple sold 2.6 million computers, up 4 percent from last year. With market research analysts expecting the overall PC market to decline by as much as 5 percent this year, "this puts us 7 to 9 percent ahead of the market," Cook said.

Sales of portable Macs—MacBooks and MacBook Pros—did even better, growing 13 percent in the quarter. Another interesting factoid: Apple says half of the people who bought a Mac in the quarter had never bought a Mac before, a sign that Windows users are continuing to convert.

Unit sales of iPods were down 7 percent but Apple still moved 10.2 million of them. Apple said sales of "traditional MP3 players" (the Nano, Shuffle and Classic) are in decline, partly because Apple is cannibalizing sales of those products with its iPhone and iPod Touch. Sales of the iPod Touch were up 130% in the quarter, Apple said. Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said Apple expects sales of "traditional iPods" to decline again in the next quarter, but sales of iPod Touch will grow. On a related bright note, Apple said it has now sold 8 billion songs from its iTunes store.

Missing from the conference call was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recently returned from a six-month medical leave and a liver transplant. Jobs did make an appearance in the earnings press release, with a ginned-up quote that read, in part, "We're making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding."

Looking ahead, Apple offered conservative guidance again—sales of $8.7 billion to $8.9 billion—but at this point does anyone believe Apple's guidance? Apple always bad-mouths its next quarter, and then beats the estimates. For now, anyway, this company is on fire.

Earthquake in Mexico

The Year of the Earthquake? Not Quite. Despite High-Profile Events, Quakes Are Not Increasing (Populations Are).
Molly O'Toole

People stand near the ruins of collapsed houses after a quake in Yushu County, northwest China's Qinghai Province. Xinhua/Landov.
Yesterday, a 6.9-magnitude quake struck Qinghai, China, resulting in an estimated 400 dead and 10,000 injured. One week before that, a 7.7 tremor hit Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Two days before that, a 7.2 shook Baja, Mexico. At the end of February, Chile shuddered under an 8.8 earthquake, little over a month after a 7.0 crumbled Haiti and killed nearly 230,000. With such a list, 2010 appears to be the year of the apocalypse or, at the very least, unnaturally active for these natural disasters.

Not according to the United States Geological Society and other experts. They say we’re not getting more quakes than usual, we’re just paying more attention. Even earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant throughout history: based on records since about 1900, approximately 17 major earthquakes, ranging from 7.0 to 7.9, and one “great” earthquake—at 8.0 magnitude or above—are expected in any given year. Not that such statistics should be taken lightly; even a slight shift of 1.0 magnitude higher on the seismic scale creates 10 times more ground motion and releases about 32 times more energy—the best indicator of the destructive power of an earthquake. So far for 2010, the 8.8 giant in Chile places into the “great” category, and five major tremors of a 7.0 magnitude or more have been recorded.

“This year has been remarkable in the number of earthquakes in close succession that have had human impacts,” says Michael Blanpied, USGS's associate coordinator for earthquake hazards. “But the number of earthquakes, from the earth’s perspective, is not unusual … it’s exciting and it’s terrible, but it’s not unusual.”

Blanpied notes that in any given year the number of earthquakes varies, with many years falling outside the range. In the last 12 months there have been a normal 18 earthquakes at 7.0 and above, while over the course of the last three and a half months there have been six—only slightly above average for that time period.

In the past decade, 2007 actually saw the largest earthquakes, with four of 8.0 magnitude or larger. Though 2009 only witnessed one such “great” quake, last year 16 tremors of 7.0 or higher shook the world. And 2004 was the deadliest year, with 228,802 estimated deaths from earthquakes (though as of yesterday, 2010 has already seen approximately 223,142). Yet, according to Blanpied, 1943 had 32 earthquakes at 7.0 or above—twice the annual average—and one of the largest quakes ever recorded, a 9.5 magnitude, struck Chile in 1963.

The best explanation is not a global growth in the frequency or power of earthquakes, but rather a number of factors contributing to that perception, namely an increase in the number of earthquakes that seismic centers are now able to locate. According to the USGS, in 1931 there were only roughly 350 seismograph stations in the world; today there are more than 8,000. Currently, the National Earthquake Information Center locates roughly 50 earthquakes a day and 20,000 annually. Drastic improvements in communications technology now allows these stations to fire data around the globe, detecting and describing quakes that would have previously gone uncharted and informing the public in a broader way than ever before—even, according to USGS spokeswoman Clarice Ransom, through Twitter.

“Seismic networks have become more and more modern,” says Blanpied, “and can report an earthquake with even greater speed and accuracy—within a few minutes anywhere in the country, and within a few minutes anywhere in the globe, from the vulnerability of structures to how many people were shaken.”

Another factor is location. Had these recent earthquakes occurred deep in the ocean, not near dense population, they would not be given the same attention.

“Probably the more sobering [factor], frankly, is there are more and more of us,” Blanpied says. “The biggest areas of population growth on the planet are those near the equator, and a lot of the seismic hazard of the earth is in that area … The earth is chucking earthquake darts at us all over the planet, and we’ve put out more and more targets. There’s more and more chance of an earthquake hitting a target, and every once in a while it hits a Haiti, a bull’s-eye.”

As for the seeming connection between this year’s tragic quakes, Blanpied says not enough is yet known about the nature of earthquakes to establish concrete ties between seismic events—though for quakes such as those in Haiti and China, whose effects were relatively localized and the distance between them great, any connection in highly unlikely.

“Chile was the fifth biggest earthquake in a century,” says Blanpied. “Those seismic waves rang around the world. It is possible those had influence on other faults that were ready to have earthquakes. Perhaps we will learn over time that major earthquakes have effects on those elsewhere, but at least not for sometime in the future … certainly not at the level of knowledge that would allow us to take any kind of action, but, hopefully, they can serve as reminders.”

Earthquake in China

A Sympathetic Hearing

Han Chinese think Tibetans are ingrates who don't appreciate the boon Beijing has given them. This week's earthquake showed wealthy Han that Tibetans are not so well off after all.

By Isaac Stone Fish Newsweek Web Exclusive

When a 7.1-magnitude earthquake rocked parts of Yushu prefecture in remote Qinghai province this week, China responded much as it did in 2008, when a 7.9-magnitude temblor hit Sichuan. A relief effort began immediately: rescue workers and volunteers rushed to the scene, donations flowed to aid groups, and Premier Wen Jiabao flew to the area to show his support. But this week's quake struck a different kind of people than the ones in Sichuan, who are mostly members of the ethnic Han majority. Inhabitants of Yushu are 97 percent ethnic Tibetans, thought to be more sympathetic to the Dalai Lama and his claims for Tibetan autonomy. Although sensitivity about ethnic conflict in China makes surveying difficult, Tibetans are generally regarded by the wealthier Han as ungrateful for the ample economic boon that Beijing’s policies have brought them.