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Yahoo swept out Scott Thompson as CEO Sunday in an effort to clean up a mess created by a misleading resume that destroyed his credibility as he set out to turn around the long-troubled Internet company.

Ross Levinsohn, a 48-year-old executive who oversees Yahoo’s media and advertising services, is taking over as interim CEO.

Yahoo lured Thompson away from eBay’s PayPal in January to end a financial funk that has depressed the company’s stock for years. Although Yahoo remains one of the Internet’s most-visited websites, the company’s financial and stock performance has suffered in the face of competition from companies like Google and Facebook. The company’s foibles have exasperated investors who have seen Yahoo go through four full-time CEOs in less than five years without delivering on repeated promises to revive its revenue growth.

Thompson’s abrupt exit after just four months came as part of the latest shake-up on Yahoo’s board of directors, which has been in a state of flux for several months.

Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and four other directors who had already announced plans to step down at the company’s annual meeting later this year are leaving the board immediately. All five of those directors signed off on the hiring of Thompson, a move that made them all look bad by the recent revelation that they didn’t catch an inaccuracy that had been circulating about his educational background for years.

Three of Yahoo’s vacated board seats will be filled by activist hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, a disgruntled shareholder who dropped the bombshell that led to Thompson’s departure, and two of his allies, former MTV Networks executive Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson.

Alfred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive who joined Yahoo’s board just three months ago, replaces Bostock as chairman. After all the changes have been finalized, Yahoo will have 11 board members.

The appointment of the new directors ends a potentially disruptive battle with Loeb, who was waging a campaign to gain four seats on the company’s board. Loeb wound up settling for three board seats and the satisfaction of ushering out Thompson, who antagonized Loeb in late March by telling him he wasn’t qualified for the board.

In a statement issued through Yahoo, Loeb said he is “delighted” to join the Yahoo board and promised to “work collaboratively with our fellow directors.” Loeb’s fund, Third Point LLC, has invested about $1 billion to build a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo.

Although Yahoo Inc. gave no official explanation for Thompson’s departure, it was clearly tied to inaccuracies that appeared on Thompson’s biography on the company’s website and in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The bio listed two degrees — in accounting and computer science — from Stonehill College, a small school near Boston. Loeb discovered Thompson never received a computer science degree from the college and exposed the fabrication in a May 3 letter to Yahoo’s board. The revelation raised questions about why the accomplishment had periodically appeared on his bio in the years while he was running PayPal, an online payment service owned by eBay Inc.

Yahoo initially stood behind Thompson, brushing off the inclusion of the bogus degree as an “inadvertent error,” but harsh criticism from employees, shareholders and corporate governance experts prompted the board to appoint a special committee to investigate how the fabrication occurred.

“Yahoo has a circuitous way of getting to the right answer, but I believe they have gotten to it,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan.

Thompson, 54, spent much of the past week scrambling to save his job. He sent out a memo to employees to apologize for the distractions caused by news of the illusory degree and then sought to assure other Yahoo executives that he wasn’t the source of the inaccuracy. He blamed a Chicago headhunting firm, Heidrick & Struggles.

In an internal memo last week, Heidrick & Struggles denied Thompson’s accusation. “This allegation is verifiably not true and we have notified Yahoo! to that effect,” CEO Kevin Kelly wrote to employees. On Sunday, a spokesman for the firm declined to comment.

Thompson’s rapid downfall leaves Yahoo in turmoil amid a reorganization that had only just begun. Last month, Thompson laid off 2,000 employees, or 14 percent of the workforce, in the biggest payroll purge in the company’s history, and had started to identify about 50 services that he wanted to close or sell.

Now it falls to Levinsohn, whom Thompson had promoted to a more prominent role last week, to get Yahoo back on track. He joined Yahoo 18 months ago when the company was still being run by Carol Bartz, who was fired in September. Before coming to Yahoo, Levinsohn had won fans running Fox Interactive, the Internet arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire at News Corp.

“This may seem like a great deal of news to digest, but as you are all keenly aware, Yahoo is a dynamic, global company in a dynamic, global industry, so change — sometimes unexpected and sometimes at lightning speed — is something we will continue to live with and something we should embrace,” Levinsohn wrote to Yahoo employees Sunday in a memo provided to The Associated Press.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan thinks Levinsohn’s media background may make him better qualified to be Yahoo’s CEO than Thompson, whose experience is rooted in electronic commerce.

“Ross Levinsohn is common-sense executive, a pragmatic operator who people love to work for,” Rohan said. “He is the right guy for this job.”

Carlos Kirjner, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein also suggested Thompson’s experience running PayPal’s rapidly expanding service made him a bad fit at Yahoo.

“It is very different to be CEO of a growth company, making choices between opportunities, and to be CEO of a company in turnaround mode, whose parts are declining or losing share,” Kirjner said.

Thompson’s inaccurate resume might have been more forgivable at a company that was posting big returns for its shareholders, said James Post, a management professor at Boston University. But it’s likely that Third Point was looking for an excuse to get rid of Thompson, Post said.

But Yahoo’s stock has been sagging since it squandered an opportunity to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. in May 2008 for $33 per share, or $47.5 billion. Yahoo’s stock hasn’t traded above $20 since September 2008. The shares ended last week at $15.19.

“Yahoo has been embattled for such a long time that there are a lot of people prepared to believe the worst about that company,” said Post, who specializes in corporate governance and professional ethics. . “When you’re angry at the management and the board, when nothing’s going right and you’re losing money, it’s understandable that shareholders would adopt an ‘off with their head’ attitude.”

Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research, said he believes Thompson’s ouster will be a positive move, removing an overhanging distraction and adding board members with new perspectives. Wieser said employees he’d talked to believed Thompson was showing a lack of appreciation for some of Yahoo’s business units, and that morale had degenerated even more during his tenure. “It was bad,” Wieser said, “and went to worse.”

Wieser said that Third Point is “exactly the kind of investor every company should want,” since the hedge fund is apparently trying to heal Yahoo, not break it up. “There are no barbarians at the gate here,” Wieser said. “They’re actually trying to help.”

At this point, Oracle’s arguments come down to this: Google was lazy in developing Android and wanted the highest revenue return possible, so that’s why it used the 37 Java APIs at question in this copyright lawsuit.

Well, no one at Google is going to deny that they wanted Android to make money — although they might dance around how successful Android has been in order to save face in front of the jury.

Oracle led with a video clip from the deposition of Google’s senior financial analyst for Android, Aditya Agarwal, on April 8, 2011.

The point of the clip, which ran for less than a minute and a half just to identify the witness to the jury and get one question out, was very clear. When asked, Agarwal affirmed that Android is hugely profitable.

That’s not exactly breaking news, but the Oracle’s ambition in this regard was clear from the get-go. In fact, Oracle might need to hold onto this strategy desperately over the course of the next couple of days after a tension-filled hour in which former Sun CEO’s Jonathan Schwartz nearly torpedoed their entire case that the Java APIs weren’t free to use without a license.

Oracle’s legal team might have made a brief comeback with help from Sun co-founder Scott McNealy, whose testimony is actually part of the rebuttal, but because of scheduling conflicts he appeared while Google was still presenting its case. During his time on the stand, McNealy’s testimony essentially contradicted everything Schwartz said, which might have left the jury fairly confused on who to believe.

Furthermore, Oracle recalled Dr. Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle, who already testified once for Oracle on April 18.

Bringing up that there has been some debate over using the term “blueprint” to refer to APIs, Oracle counsel Michael Jacobs asked Reinhold if this was an accurate description.

Reinhold stood by using the term blueprint to describe APIs, explaining that “the whole point of the Java community process is to be designing blueprints so companies can develop competing implementations.”

Google counsel Bruce Baber tried to refute this, questioning Reinhold that the API specification doesn’t tell one how to write the code.

Reinhold admitted that it doesn’t.

Reinhold’s testimony was also used to make another one of Oracle’s points clear: Google took the easy way out in developing Android.

When asked if a developer already has a good API design and if implementing an existing API design is more work, Reinhold explained that it’s a “relatively easier job” and “it’s almost always less” work.

Closing statements from both Oracle and Google are expected to start on Monday. After that, the jury will have time to deliberate a verdict for the copyrights portion of the trial.

Judge Alsup predicted on Wednesday that the jury will probably only take about a day and a half to reach a decision, but he warned that they could take up to a week.

On Friday, the judge added with a warning to both legal teams about getting evidence in on time, “When the case goes to them, the case is in their hands — including when they make the decision.”

Thousands of years ago, here was the largest and most prosperous city of the world —— Changan; after the millennium, the deep culture seems to let me return to the Tang. This ancient city has quietly waiting for a thousand years, let’s ride the time tunnel and cross back to Changan with me!

Shaanxi Cuisine, also known as Qin Cuisine, is the representative culinary achievement in the northwest China. In comparison to other Chinese cuisines, it is outstanding in three aspects. Firstly, due to Shaanxi’s geographical location in the center of China, various kinds of materials deriving from both north and south China are adopted by Shaanxi Cuisine. Second is the special cooking skills of the local chefs, including Tun (deep-fry), Qiang (fry quickly in hot oil, then cook with sauce and water), Chao (stir-fry), Zheng (cook by use of steam), Dun (braise) and so on. Finally is its frequently use of salt, vinegar, capsicum and garlic, making the savory flavor of sour, spicy and fragrant.

The history of Shaanxi Cuisine is said to be as long as the national’s civilization, retaining the table characteristics of the Qin, Han and Tang dynasties. At present, the Shaanxi Cuisine is divided into the Guanzhong (central Shaanxi), Shannan (south Shaanxi) and Shanbei (north Shaanxi) cuisines according to their geographical locations. Here, in Xian, the Guanzhong Cuisine plays the vital role in the citizens’ daily lives as well as the Shannan and Shanbei dishes supply the gastronomists with another choice.

Visitors to Xian must do two things: one is to see the clay figures of terra cotta warriors and horses. The other is to taste Yang Rou Pao Mo (a soup dish that involves breaking wheat flour flat bread into a bowl and adding a delicious mutton stock). Before dinner, you will be served one or two pieces of wheat flour flat bread which you into tiny chunks, the smaller the better.

The waiter or the waitress will then hand your bowl to the cook who mixes the bread and mutton soup with an appropriate relish. When the steaming hot meal is brought in, the waiter will also offer you sweet crisp pickled garlic, coriander, and hot pepper sauce.

In Xian, there is a must for travelers to try the delicious dumplings. While tasting those dumplings, customers will be astonished by the cooks’ smart cooking methods include steaming, boiling, pan-frying, deep frying, and roasting. It seems that all of the indigenous meat and vegetables can be used for the dumplings’ stuffing, such as pork, mutton, beef as well as celery, radish, cabbages, etc.

Nowadays, by the cooks’ continuously improving, the dumpling has been one of the best foods of Xian to entertain travelers from home and abroad. It must be a great pity if you miss tasting the Xian’s featured Dumpling Banquet. Usually, the Dumpling Banquet consists of a number of steamed dumplings as well as the family style dumplings are boiled which can be easily found in some chophouses distributed in Xian City.

It is hardly for any traveler to taste all of the Xian snacks in his short stay here. That is because no one could point out exactly how many kinds of snacks exist in this historic city. In fact, discovering and enjoying as many as local snack should be only next to visiting the Terra-cotta Warriors and Horses. If you are a gourmet longing for typical Chinese food, the various kinds of Xian snacks will give you as much personal satisfaction as possible, ranging from dim sum, candy, cracker to dried fruit and dessert.

When you ask locals for a place to find the featured Xian snacks, it is no doubt that you will be suggested to visit the Moslem Street firstly although this city’s main composition of population is Han. As a unique characteristic, the Moslem food occupies a vital role in the Xian Cuisine (also Shaanxi Cuisine), partly because the Hui people have inhabited here in a large number for many years.

Anyway, this narrow but prosperous street is the largest assembling place for all of the Moslem food over half of which are the Moslem snacks.

Alternatively, you can have some snack at the elegant Moslem restaurants which are distributed everywhere in the city area.

As the representative of Shaanxi Cuisine, Guanzhong dish is well know for cooking pork and mutton as well as in strong and heavy flavor.

In addition, the simplex but choice material in a course gives a pure taste to the Guanzhong dish. Shannan dish emphasizes on the use of pepper, having a spicy flavor.

Also using pork and mutton frequently, the Shanbei dish is usually cooked by steaming.

How Yang Rou Pau Mo is served. The custom is both unique and interesting. When you order the meal you will be given a large bowl and a quantity of round, flat unleavened bread (nan bread). The amount of bread depends entirely upon the size of your appetite! You have to break the bread into small pieces so that it can absorb the flavor of the liquid.

Be warned, the bread is hard and it will prove something of a test of strength for your fingers but the smaller you break the pieces, the better the result. Once you have prepared your bread, you pass your bowl to the chef who will stir it into a pot of hot mutton soup. After some five to ten minutes he will ladle the soup and bread back into your bowl with a quantity of mutton.

More photos…