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Amazon's newest realization: selling physical 'stuff' is a thing of the past

Reuters examined Amazon's profitability outlook and found that the company's real growth is not going to come from selling books and toys.

REDD: The Amazon's carbon cowboys

IQUITOS, Peru — The dark side of the Amazon's carbon-credit market.

REDD: Saving the Amazon rainforest

LIMA — Currently, some 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions come from deforestation — more than from global transport.

REDD: When carbon credits work in the Amazon

PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru — This is what tropical deforestation looks like on the ground.

Ecuador: Chevron loses appeal against $18-billion pollution fine

Appeals judges yesterday upheld a 2011 ruling that Chevron should pay damages and "moral reparation" to the Ecuadorean authorities. A court had originally set the fine at $8.6 billion, but more than doubled it after Chevron refused to make a public apology.

Google maps the Amazon

The famous forest will soon appear on Google's Street View.
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Google cameras see trees of green: the Amazon rainforest. (Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images)


In its quest to map the entire planet, Google has started in on the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

Google started its Street View in Brazil last year. But until recently, it’s just been focused on the country’s bustling cities and towns.

Now, it plans to send its street-view cameras on tricycles down dirt trails, and even mount them on boats to capture on-the-ground pictures.

Google also will rely on the aid of local people to add details that only they would know, such as well-traveled paths or far-flung villages. The tech giant plans to work with Amazonas Sustainable Foundation, a non-profit organization backed by the Brazilian government that works to conserve the forest and improve the livelihood of communities who live there.

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US confirms first known case of vampire bat rabies

Vampire bats are currently found only in Latin America, where they are the leading cause of rabies.

Vampire bats are the leading cause of rabies in Latin America.

Now, for the first time, health authorities have confirmed that someone in the United States died from rabies transmitted by a vampire bat.

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Uncontacted Amazon tribe still missing

A flight over the tribe's lands fails to locate any tribe members, while huts and crops remain untouched.
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Photo of the now-missing tribe. (Gleison Miranda/FUNAI/Survival International/Courtesy)

CNN has an update today on the uncontacted Amazon tribe that recently went missing.

Officials still haven't been able to locate the tribe, CNN says, and cannot say whether the Indians were run off by a group of suspected drug traffickers.

Brazil's National Indian Foundation conducted an overnight flight of the tribe's huts, but did not spot anyone. When the agency flew over the area in the past, villagers appeared frightened and armed themselves with longbows.

The huts and crops were still there and appeared untouched, agency spokesman Bruno Perez told CNN.

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Amazon launches free web-based Kindle Cloud Reader

The reader allows users to read books from the cloud or download for offline reading, using HTML 5.

Harry Potter e-book to sell on Pottermore, J.K. Rowling says

Rowling plans to give Pottermore users an incentive — new material about characters, places and objects in the series which will, she says, make a visit to Pottermore an immersive experience.
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