San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
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In a week when Apple saw stars, Lyft saw gazillions and Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan saw the exit sign, this also happened: Google signed a deal that moves Cuba one step closer to having a state-of-the-art connection to the internet. The Mountain View company and the Cuban government agreed to create a cost-free connection between their two networks once Cuba is able to connect to an undersea fiber-optic cable coming sometime in the future. The deal linking Google’s internet backbone to Cuba’s local network would allow Cubans to connect faster to content hosted on Google servers. It would also reduce the government’s cost of connecting users to Google. Disney is eliminating smoking areas at its theme and water parks in California and Florida. It said smoking also won’t be allowed at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex or Downtown Disney in California starting May 1. Smoking areas will be available outside the parks and those entertainment areas. Disney Springs in Florida and the company’s hotels also will have smoking areas.
The National Association of Realtors’ pending home sales index fell 1 percent in February after a 4.3 percent jump in January. The mystery of the Garfield phones was finally solved. For three decades, bright orange plastic novelty phones shaped like the grumpy cartoon cat kept washing up on the rocky Atlantic shoreline of Brittany, in western France. Over the years, locals have picked up hundreds of pieces of the phones, including paws, headset cables and even Garfield heads, forever fixed in his familiar smirk. But nobody knew exactly where they came from. This month, though, volunteers cleaning the beaches solved the puzzle: The source of the Garfield phones was a long-lost shipping container, nestled in a rocky sea cave.
Sunoco cut ties with a Pennsylvania gas station owner after a digital billboard flashed a racial slur and praised the acquittal of a white police officer in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen. After the jury’s verdict, a digital billboard in Worthington displayed photos of both people and branded the dead teen a “criminal.” Sunoco halted fuel deliveries and removed its signage from the station.