Yahoo is close to paying $1 billion and forking over its China operations for a 35 percent stake of China's second-largest e-commerce operator, Alibaba.com, a source close to the discussions said on Wednesday.
The combination would create an e-commerce giant by bringing together Alibaba's business-to-business and consumer online auction sites with Yahoo's search operations. Alibaba runs both Chinese- and English-language auction sites serving foreign companies looking for Chinese wholesale suppliers and individual Chinese buyers and sellers.
Both companies refused to comment on the reports.
Yahoo (YHOO) would swap its country operations in exchange for a structure more similar to Yahoo Japan, in which the U.S. search giant holds a 33 percent stake while Japan's Softbank holds a controlling 42 percent.
An analyst at a major western brokerage, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Yahoo's ultimate aim may be to buy all of Alibaba -- an option that has been mentioned as part of an overall deal in the Chinese media.
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Let us play: Japanese musicians under contract with Sony and other labels that haven't joined Apple's iTunes Music Store are starting to defy their recording companies and trying to get their music on the popular download service launched last week in Japan.
At least one artist has already gone against his label to offer his songs on iTunes. And a major agency that manages Japanese musicians said Wednesday it was interested in a possible deal with Apple (AAPL), regardless of the recording companies' positions.
Online music stores had not taken off in Japan until iTune's arrival last Thursday, which opened with a million songs from 15 Japanese record labels. In just four days, customers downloaded 1 million songs. But Sony's music division, Sony Music Entertainment, has not signed up to join Apple's service.
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Surf on the go: Opera Software on Wednesday announced a new version of its internet browser that allows web surfing from almost any mobile phone, even inexpensive ones with little built-in memory.
Accessing the internet has largely been restricted to higher-end mobile phones with the memory capacity to run a browser.
The Oslo-based company said its new Opera Mini browser can allow surfing from 700 million low- to medium-cost phones without space for a traditional browser. Opera said the system only requires the phone to have a small Java program, because instead of the phone itself processing a web page, a remote server preprocesses the page before sending it to the phone.
Opera Mini is currently a pilot project, with the software offered through the Norwegian commercial television network TV-2, but broader distribution is also planned, a news release said.
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How the mighty fall: The former director of general accounting at WorldCom was sentenced Tuesday to one year and one day in prison and fined $5,000 for his role in the company's record $11 billion fraud.
The sentence for Buford "Buddy" Yates, 49, came nearly three years after he pleaded guilty to helping WorldCom overstate its earnings from 2000 to 2002 in a scandal that bankrupted the telecom company.
Yates is one of five former WorldCom executives who pleaded guilty to fraud and helped the government build its case against former Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers, who was sentenced last month to 25 years in prison.
Last week, Betty Vinson, a former WorldCom accounting official who said she pulled some numbers "out of the air" when she helped fudge company books, was sentenced to five months in prison. Another former accounting official, Troy Normand, was sentenced to three years of probation.
Two other former executives who were higher in the company -- controller David Myers and chief financial officer Scott Sullivan, the star witness against Ebbers -- will be sentenced later this week.
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All systems go: The European Commission has given its approval to plans by U.S. aerospace and defense firms Lockheed Martin and Boeing to merge their rocket-launch services.
The European Union head office said late Tuesday that the joint venture known as United Launch Alliance posed no competition concerns in the European market.
Boeing (BA) and Lockheed (LMT) will combine the production, engineering, test and launch operations associated with the U.S. government launches of the Atlas and Delta rockets. The companies will each control 50 percent of the venture, which is expected to generate between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in annual revenue.
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Yuan's new mix: China disclosed for the first time Wednesday the composition of the basket of currencies used to set the yuan's value, saying it mainly includes the dollar, euro, yen and Korean won.
The currencies of Singapore, Britain, Malaysia, Russia, Australia, Canada and Thailand are also considered in setting the yuan's foreign exchange rate, said Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank governor.
The news dispels at least some of the mystery surrounding the yuan's new exchange rate, although there was no information about the weightings of each currency. When China cut its currency's decade-long peg to the dollar on July 21 and allowed it to move in a restricted float, it said the yuan's exchange rate would be determined by a collection of unspecified currencies.
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Space is on the rise: The slump in the global space and satellite market is over, and government and commercial sales should reach $158 billion by 2010, up from $103 billion in 2004, according to a report released on Tuesday.
"Now is a good time to be involved in the space and satellite industry," concluded the annual report compiled by the International Space Business Council, an independent consulting group based in Bethesda, Maryland.
"Government funding for space is on the rise, commercial orders for satellites and launches have rebounded and stabilized, new exploration initiatives are being pursued and entrepreneurial efforts related to radio, broadband and space tourism are generating excitement," it said.
Other factors behind the market's reemerging strength were the $40 billion satellite-to-consumer television market, strong and growing demand for satellite radio and global positioning satellite and tracking capabilities, it said.
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AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
