Crunch time: Google Japan uses potato chips to promote Pixel 7 | Arab News

2022-09-16 20:18:18 By : Ms. Anna Jiang

LONDON: Google’s latest phone, the Pixel 7, is set to be unveiled to the public in early October and the tech giant’s Japanese division has come up with a tasty way to ramp up interest ahead of the launch.

A new marketing campaign, titled “Google Original Chips,” will give 2,000 people the chance to win one of four limited edition potato chip boxes created specifically for the event.

Exclusively available in Japan, people have until Friday, Sept. 23 to enter a lottery via Google’s website.

The boxes come in a range of colors that match the Pixel 7 series, while the chips come in Snow Cheese, Obsidian Pepper, Hazel Onion and Salty Lemon flavors.

While Snow Cheese and Obsidian Pepper are offered across both models, Salty Lemon is available only for the Pixel 7 and Hazel Onion exclusively for the Pixel 7 Plus.

Last year, Google put together a similar campaign to support the launch of its Pixel 6, though the choice of flavors was limited to just one, Google Salty.

The visual feel of the potato chip boxes is inspired by the new model and features the visor of the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro on the front.

Google is using the buzz created by the campaign to highlight the phone’s new features, including the Tensor G2 chipset and its photographic and video capabilities.

People took to Twitter to comment on the marketing stunt with some suggesting it be rolled out to other countries.

This is an ever so Japanese, genius marketing gimmick! Wish it could make its way to the west. #marketing #pixel7 #Japan

— Rob Simpson (@Rob_Simpson94) September 13, 2022

This is not the first time Google has used food to promote its products. In 2019 it delivered its Pixel 4 devices in a cereal box-style package with marshmallows inside.

The latest promotion comes as Google struggles to find a place in the competitive smartphone market. The company is still a small player in the sector, with Japan being its most successful market outside the US.

HANOI: Tourists and cafe owners along Hanoi’s “train street” spoke of their disappointment Friday as the hotspot was closed due to safety concerns, just weeks after reopening following a long Covid-19 closure. The narrow corridor in the Vietnamese capital drew hordes of tourists before the pandemic, each eager to grab a selfie or watch a train rumble past one of the fashionable eateries set just a meter from the track. Safety concerns prompted the street’s shutdown in 2019 but many businesses quietly opened in recent weeks, keen to cash in on the tourist revival after Vietnam reopened to visitors earlier this year. Nguyen Thi Thu had begun to see her cafe recover. “The tourists had come back and we were earning enough to make a living,” she said. Built by colonial rulers, the railway once transported goods and people across French Indochina and is still in use by communist Vietnam’s state-run rail company. The stretch of tracks on “train street,” once in an area occupied by drug users and squatters, was transformed after social media users began sharing photos and locals realized the business potential. On Friday, the kilometer-long line was blocked off by police — though a nearby section of track remained open. A local official told state media the businesses along the street were violating railway safety rules. Jay Arriola, from the UK, said he was miffed that the cafes were closed after being told about the site by his girlfriend. “It is a bit of a disappointment,” he said. “I wanted to go to a cafe that has a top level... (to have) a perspective on the train going through that trail between the houses,” adding that “a top deck might be safer.” Keeping customers safe had been part of cafe owner Thu’s daily routine. “When it was time for the train to pass by, we asked all guests to move in, there was no danger at all.”

DUBAI: Two years after the signing of the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between the UAE and Israel, the UAE rabbi got married on Wednesday at the Hilton Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.

Rabbi Levi Duchman, 29, tied the knot with Lea Hadad, 27, the daughter of Rabbi Menachem Hadad, the chabad chief rabbi in Brussels.

The event, which purposefully coincided with the second anniversary of the accords, highlighted the growing presence of Jewish life in the Emirates where until just a few years ago Jews would have to keep their services almost hidden from the public.

About 1,500 guests attended the ceremony, including high-ranking officials from the UAE government and more than 20 ambassadors from France, Japan, South Korea, Finland and elsewhere. Prominent businessmen, including Emirati entrepreneur Mohamed Alabbar were also at the event, as were male and female Catholic priests, reflecting the UAE’s growing commitment to interfaith and co-existence.

“We are most fortunate to be in this great place the United Arab Emirates,” Rabbi Levi Banon of the chabad of Morocco — Duchman’s brother-in-law and master of ceremonies for the evening — told guests from the chuppah, or wedding canopy.

“We feel your motto of excellence and hospitality. Thank you for making us feel at home.”

While the exact number of Jews residing in the UAE is unknown, estimates range from 500 to 3,000 or more since the Abraham Accords were signed. Since normalization, the UAE has welcomed over 200,000 Jewish tourists, a figure that is on the rise given the increasing number of Israelis and Jews living in the UAE and establishing businesses there.

The welcoming ceremony in Abu Dhabi was attended by friends and family from around the world, some making their first trips since the start of the pandemic. During the ceremony, the mothers of the bride and groom “broke the glass,” — the Jewish tradition representing goodwill for a long-lasting marriage between their children.

Hundreds of guests watched as the couple were united in marriage in the chuppah, which symbolizes the home they will build together. Emiratis, Israelis, Americans and other nationalities mingled and conversed as they watched the young couple take their vows.

Rabbi Levi, who has lived in the UAE since 2014, is committed to serving the country’s growing Jewish community. Since his arrival, he has established communities in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including numerous places of worship, and founded Mini Miracles, the country’s only kosher multilingual nursery and preschool in the Jumeirah neighborhood of Dubai. A second branch is set to open in Abu Dhabi.

He also established a Hebrew supplemental school, a mikvah for the Jewish rite of purification and the government-licensed kosher agency, as well as bringing several rabbis to the UAE to join him in serving the community.

He also set up a training program for rabbinical interns and has helped Israeli and Jewish businesses take root in the Emirates following the accords.

“The couple’s commitment to get married in Abu Dhabi demonstrates their long-term commitment to serving the UAE’s growing Jewish community,” said a Jewish New Yorker who flew in for the occasion.

Rabbi Levi was born in Brooklyn and spent two years in Morocco with his sister Chana and her family. It was there that he was inspired to help grow Jewish life in the Arab world.

His father, Rabbi Sholom Duchman, is the director of the Colel chabad, which was founded in 1788 and is the oldest operating charity in Israel.

Hadad is of Moroccan heritage and was born and raised in Belgium. She is the daughter of Chief Rabbi Menachem Hadad. Her grandfather began the tradition of emissary work when he set up the chabad community in Milan.

“Rabbi Levi and Lea are a perfect couple,” said Alan Kay, a Jew from the UK who has lived in Abu Dhabi for 11 years.

“The fact that they chose their marriage to take place in Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, is testament to their commitment to the country and to building the Jewish community here.”

NEW YORK: New York City’s latest celebrity visitor is stopping traffic even in this jaded, larger-than-life town. Little Amal, a 12-foot puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, is on a 17-day blitz through every corner of the Big Apple as part of a theater project hoping to raise awareness about immigration. “When we talk about migration and refugees, we tend to forget that more than half of the people we’re talking about are children,” said playwright and director Amir Nizar Zuabi, the artistic director of Little Amal Walks NYC. “The reality is they’re children and all children are beautiful in their own special way. And I think that’s what Amal brings to the table.” She will visit tourists meccas — Times Square, Grand Central Station, the American Museum of Natural History and Central Park, among them — and also communities far from the glitz of Manhattan, like Corona in the Queens borough and Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. “The role of the project is to talk about displacement, to talk about immigration, to talk about vulnerability in different contexts and, of course, each locality,” said Zuabi. At each of the 55 planned stops, organizers have reached out to community artists and leaders to create a special event anchored by the place visited. So, Amal will join kids her age to hear a reading of the inclusive picture book “Julián Is a Mermaid” at the Brooklyn Public Library. And when she goes to Harlem she will listen to a drum circle performed by students from the Harlem School of the Arts and be accompanied by a stilt walker from Kotchenga Dance Company. Yazmany Arboleda, a Colombian American artist who is creative producer of the New York visit, calls it one of the largest scale theatrical experiences ever built in the city: “This is the biggest stage on Earth and it comes from all the pluralism, of all the stories, of all the people who live here.” The puppet comes to the city after completing a 5,000-mile trek across Europe, from the Syrian-Turkish border to Manchester in northwest England. She has traveled through 12 countries — including greeting refuges from Ukraine at a Polish train station and stopping at refugee camps in Greece — and met with Pope Francis. “New York is interesting because it is a city built from displacement, forced migration and migration. These are the elements that created the city. And the city looms tall and has a very, very interesting engine of creativity, of innovation, of audaciousness. So, bringing this project here is very interesting for us,” said Zuabi. During a recent rehearsal at the performing arts institution and project co-producer St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, Zuabi stressed the core idea with his 10 puppeteers, four of which are needed to manipulate the puppet at any one time. “She is a 10-year-old lost in the city. Whenever you are in doubt, go back to that,” he told them as they stretched in a circle. “She’s never safe in this city. If we understand that, I think we can make real magic.” Some other stops for the puppet — designed and built by Handspring Puppet Company — include salsa dancing in Washington Heights, walking along the Coney Island boardwalk and listening to drummers in Jackson Heights. At Grand Central Station on Thursday, she loomed over admiring pedestrians, who gazed up and took pictures. “We often focus on the plight of the immigrant or the refugee, and I think what this work does is really bring our attention to the promise and the beauty,” said Arboleda. “As she walks through New York, we’re all going to be learning along.” One of Amal’s stops will be Liberty Island, where she’ll come face-to-toe with the Statue of Liberty, who welcomes the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” “The core of this project is empathy, is to fight indifference, because indifference is like a stone. You can’t turn it. It’s what it is. The minute you start cracking indifference, something happens,” said Zuabi.

MEXICO CITY: A prehistoric human skeleton has been found in a cave system that was flooded at the end of the last ice age 8,000 years ago, according to a cave-diving archaeologist on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. Archaeologist Octavio del Rio said he and fellow diver Peter Broger saw the shattered skull and skeleton partly covered by sediment in a cave near where the Mexican government plans to build a high-speed tourist train through the jungle. Given the distance from the cave entrance, the skeleton couldn’t have gotten there without modern diving equipment, so it must be over 8,000 years old, Del Rio said, referring to the era when rising sea levels flooded the caves. “There it is. We don’t know if the body was deposited there or if that was where this person died,” said Del Rio. He said that the skeleton was located about 8 meters (26 feet) underwater, about a half-kilometer (one third of a mile) into the cave system. Some of the oldest human remains in North America have been discovered in the sinkhole caves known as “cenotes” on the country’s Caribbean coast, and experts say some of those caves are threatened by the Mexican government’s Maya Train tourism project. Del Rio, who has worked with the National Institute of Anthropology and History on projects in the past, said he had notified the institute of the discovery. The institute did not immediately respond to questions about whether it intended to explore the site. But Del Rio said Tuesday that institute archaeologist Carmen Rojas told him that the site was registered and would be investigated by the institute’s Quintana Roo state branch Holocene Archaeology Project. He stressed that the cave — whose location he did not reveal because of a fear the site could be looted or disturbed — was near where the government has cut down a swath of jungle to lay train tracks, and could be collapsed, contaminated or closed off by the building project and subsequent development. “There is a lot more study that has to be done in order to correctly interpret” the find, Del Rio said, noting that “dating, some kind of photographic studies and some collection” would be needed to determine exactly how old the skeleton is. Del Rio has been exploring the region for three decades, and in 2002, he participated in the discovery and cataloguing of remains known as The Woman of Naharon, who died around the same time, or perhaps earlier, than Naia — the nearly complete skeleton of a young woman who died around 13,000 years ago. It was discovered in a nearby cave system in 2007. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is racing to finish his Maya Train project in the remaining two years of his term over the objections of environmentalists, cave divers and archaeologists. They say his haste will allow little time to study the ancient remains. Activists say the heavy, high-speed rail project will fragment the coastal jungle and will run often above the fragile limestone caves, which — because they’re flooded, twisty and often incredibly narrow — can take decades to explore. Caves along part of the coast already have been damaged by construction above them, with cement pilings used to support the weight above. The 950-mile (1,500-kilometer) Maya Train line is meant to run in a rough loop around the Yucatan Peninsula, connecting beach resorts and archaeological sites. The most controversial stretch cuts a more than 68-mile (110-kilometer) swath through the jungle between the resorts of Cancun and Tulum. Del Rio said the route through the jungle should be abandoned and the train should be built over the already-impacted coastal highway between Cancun and Tulum, as was originally planned. López Obrador abandoned the highway route after hotel owners voiced objections, and cost and traffic interruptions became a concern. “What we want is for them to change to route at this spot, because of the archaeological finds that have been made there, and their importance,” said Del Rio. “They should take the train away from there and put it where they said they were going to build before, on the highway ... an area that has already been affected, devastated.”

NEW YORK: Ken Starr, a former federal appellate judge and a prominent attorney whose criminal investigation of Bill Clinton led to the president’s impeachment and put Starr at the center of one of the country’s most polarizing debates of the 1990s, has died at age 76, his family said Tuesday. Starr died at a hospital Tuesday of complications from surgery, according to his former colleague, attorney Mark Lanier. He said Starr had been hospitalized in an intensive care unit in Houston for about four months. For many years, Starr’s stellar reputation as a lawyer seemed to place him on a path to the Supreme Court. At age 37, he became the youngest person ever to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also had served. From 1989-93, Starr was the solicitor general in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, arguing 25 cases before the Supreme Court. Roberts said Tuesday: “Ken loved our country and served it with dedication and distinction. He led by example, in the legal profession, public service, and the community.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell remembered Starr Tuesday as “a brilliant litigator, an impressive leader, and a devoted patriot.” Despite his impressive legal credentials, nothing could have prepared him for the task of investigating a sitting president. In a probe that lasted five years, Starr looked into fraudulent real estate deals involving a long-time Clinton associate, delved into the removal of documents from the office of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster after his suicide and assembled evidence of Clinton’s sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. Each of the controversies held the potential to do serious, perhaps fatal, damage to Clinton’s presidency. As Clinton’s legal problems worsened, the White House pilloried Starr as a right-wing fanatic doing the bidding of Republicans bent on destroying the president. “The assaults took a toll” on the investigation, Starr told a Senate committee in 1999. “A duly authorized federal law enforcement investigation came to be characterized as yet another political game. Law became politics by other means.” In a bitter finish to his investigation of the Lewinsky affair that engendered still more criticism, Starr filed a report, as the law required, with the U.S. House of Representatives. He concluded that Clinton lied under oath, engaged in obstruction of justice and followed a pattern of conduct that was inconsistent with the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws. House Republicans used Starr’s report as a roadmap in the impeachment of the president, who was acquitted in a Senate trial. In 2020, he was recruited to help represent Trump in his first impeachment trial. In a memorable statement to Congress, Starr said “we are living in what I think can aptly be described as the ‘age of impeachment.’” He said that “like war, impeachment is hell, or at least presidential impeachment is hell.” Clinton’s legal problems began during the 1992 presidential campaign. Questions arose over the candidate’s ties to the owner of a failed Arkansas savings and loan. The issue faded quickly. But it caught the attention of federal regulators, who began looking into whether money from the S&L had been diverted to a real estate venture called Whitewater in which Bill and Hillary Clinton and the S&L’s owner, Jim McDougal, shared a financial interest. Bowing to intense political pressure from Republicans and some members of his own party, Clinton called for appointment of a special counsel to investigate Whitewater. A three-member appeals court for independent counsels selected Starr. On the Whitewater front, Starr’s prosecutors investigated Mrs. Clinton’s legal work for Jim McDougal’s S&L. Both she and the president were questioned by Starr’s prosecutors and their videotaped depositions were played for juries in criminal trials of McDougal and his ex-wife Susan. Neither of the Clintons was ever charged in connection with Whitewater. The investigation of Clinton’s intimate relationship with Lewinsky was a Washington spectacle. In 1995, Lewinsky went to work at the White House as an intern. During the government shutdown late that year, she and Clinton had a sexual encounter in a hallway near the Oval Office, the first of 10 sexual encounters over the next year and a half. Lewinsky confided the affair to a co-worker, Linda Tripp, who tape-recorded some of their conversations and brought the tapes to Starr’s prosecutors. Lewinsky was granted immunity from prosecution and became Starr’s chief witness against the president, who had denied having sexual relations with her. Putting the investigation behind him, Starr embarked on a career in academia, first as dean of the law school at Pepperdine University where he taught constitutional issues and civil procedures, then as president of Baylor University in his home state of Texas. He also became an author, writing “First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life.” Starr was demoted from the presidency at Baylor in 2016 amid a sex assault scandal that rocked the Big 12 school and its football program, as women alleged campus leaders at the nation’s largest Baptist school bungled or ignored their assault complaints. Baylor eventually settled with several women who filed a cascade of lawsuits, including a case where the victim of a 2015 attack accused Baylor of fostering a “hunting ground for sexual predators.” The school’s board of regents allowed Starr to stay on as chancellor and law school professor, jobs that carried no “operational” duties at Baylor. He resigned altogether a few months later. Football coach Art Briles also was fired. A review commissioned by the school found that under Starr, school administrators discouraged students from reporting or participating in student conduct reviews, and even contributed to or accommodated a “hostile” environment against the alleged victims. In a statement, Starr apologized to “those victims who were not treated with the care, concern, and support they deserve.” Starr was born in Vernon, a small Texas town near the Oklahoma state, and raised in San Antonio. He earned his B.A. from George Washington University in 1968, his M.A. from Brown University in 1969 and his J.D. degree from Duke University Law School in 1973. He was a law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1975 to 1977. As a young attorney at the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles, Starr worked with William French Smith, who became attorney general in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Starr became counselor to Smith, and from there was nominated by Reagan to the federal appeals court.