Morning Buzz: July 17, 2007

Nine people died and 13,000 were left homeless after a 6.6-magnitude earthquake shook northwestern Japan. In addition to this devastation, today officials are reporting that about 100 drums of nuclear waste tipped over at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant and water containing radioactive material leaked from the facility.

A tentative deal has been reached as Rupert Murdoch may soon gain control of the Wall Street Journal.  Murdoch offered $5 billion for Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of the Journal, and the bid will go to the board sometime today. Christopher Bancroft, whose family controls the company, has been approaching other major stockholders in an attempt to block the sale to Murdoch’s News Corp. U.S. News reported more on the details of the offer in May.

Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana denied having relations with New Orleans prostitutes but didn’t refute his ties to a Washington escort service, which federal prosecutors contend was a prostitution ring. His phone number was listed among other customers of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “D.C. Madam” accused of racketeering by prosecutors.

In another move to take over the cyberworld, Google is going to offer its searching capabilities to small businesses. Google will introduce the “Custom Search Business Edition," which will allow smaller Web operations to use the search-engine giant’s technology on their own sites to sift through 5,000 Web pages for $100 annually. Larger websites can buy an upgrade for $500 a year to search through 50,000 pages. In recent months, Google has purchased DoubleClick  and YouTube and has included new features such as Google Street View, which raised privacy concerns among some. U.S. News reported on the world according to Google in 2004.