Amazon

Two Ecuadoreans who have waged a 14-year fight to bring a U.S. energy giant to account for what they allege is massive oil contamination in the Amazon are among the winners of an international environmental prize. Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and Luis Yanza each will receive $150,000 today from the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Prize for organizing half a dozen indigenous communities to pursue legal action against Texaco and then Chevron Corp. after the two companies merged in 2001.

Abel Garrido has just struck oil and he's not happy about it. Using a tree branch, the weathered farmer probed the edge of a pond that his cattle use for drinking water and soon turned up the smelly black sludge that he says has killed much of his livestock and sickened his family. "I've lost 30 cows," Garrido said. "I cut them open and their insides are black." Paying the medical bills to treat his three children for skin cancer has cost him his meager savings.

Shareholders of Occidental Petroleum Corp. gathered Friday to hear details behind another great year in the oil business. But the celebratory mood didn't last. A group from Peru and a handful of celebrities took to the microphones during Occidental's annual meeting to accuse the oil company of causing and then ignoring pervasive health and environmental problems in a remote region of the Amazon where Occidental drilled for 30 years.

More than half the dust needed to fertilize the Brazilian rain forest originates on a dry lakebed in Africa, according to a team of researchers. About 50 million tons of dust are transported by the wind from Africa to Brazil's Amazon basin each year, and 56% of the dust originates in the Bodele Depression on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, new satellite measurements indicate.

"Money can't buy me love," the Beatles sang in 1964, and Tuesday, it couldn't buy either the stereo or mono box sets of the remastered Beatles catalog at Amazon.com, which reported selling out of both a day before their official release. The online retailer is, however, continuing to take orders for the individual CD reissues, according to an EMI Records representative, who said Amazon will be restocked on both box sets "soon." As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, five of Amazon's 10 bestselling music titles were Beatles albums, and 12 of its top 20 were occupied by the Fab Four.

Most people think of Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle as a slim piece of hardware the size of a very thin paperback book. In fact, Kindle is also a piece of software that displays digital books on any device Amazon chooses. On Thursday, the Seattle online retailing giant unveiled a Kindle version for computers. The application was part of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system launch event Thursday in New York. Expected to be released in November, the program will also run on Microsoft's earlier operating systems, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

It seems that a most important and interesting part of the story of the "island" of California was omitted--the origin of the name of California ("On the Island of California, a World of Women and Beasts," Rearview Mirror, June 11). The goddess or leader of the black Amazon women in this tale was Queen Calafia, hence the name California. Margery Pope Sherman Oaks

\o7Times staff writer David Streitfeld wrote Jan. 2 about his experiences as a customer of Amazon.com, describing price changes that occurred between when he put books in his "shopping cart" and when he went back later to complete his purchases. About 100 readers have e-mailed responses to his article, "Amazon mystery: pricing of books." Here is a sampling: \f7 --- Those darn price "warning" windows have been making my head spin. I am a graduate student and, as you experienced, I have books in my cart that I buy as I need them or dream of purchasing one day. "Bizarre" is too mundane a word to try to explain how a depth-psychology book can rise or fall $5 in one day. I would really like an explanation from Amazon.

Amazon.com started advertising for a senior wine buyer in its specialty foods group and might start offering wine as part of a new line of groceries. The buyer would be responsible for the "acquisition of massive new product selection," building it "from the ground up," Amazon said.