The company’s domestic rivals – China Unicom and China Telecom– already offer the iPhone to their subscribers.

“Both sides have been making contact with each other. And both sides are willing to boost cooperation,” Lei Yu, a spokeswoman for China Mobile, told AFP in response to a question over negotiations for the iPhone.

She declined to give further details.

China Unicom began selling the iPhone in 2009, joined by China Telecom in March this year.

If China Mobile also started offering the handset, it could help boost sales for the US technology giant in China – the world’s biggest mobile phone market.

The Apple brand is wildly popular in China, where products such as the iPhone and iPad are coveted by wealthy consumers.

Greater China — which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan — has become California-based Apple’s fastest growing region with revenues second only to the United States.

China Mobile had nearly 650 million subscribers by the end of last year, according to a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange. China as a whole had more than one billion mobile phone users at the end of February.

Some of the demonstrators hurled paint at police who were moving them on, after they ignored a request to leave voluntarily, said an AFP reporter at the scene. There were a dozen or so arrests, according to a police spokesman.

However, the clearing of the “Occupy Frankfurt” camp was largely peaceful, with around 50 demonstrators sitting stubbornly on the ground in a show of passive resistance.

The ban on the about 100 “indignants”, who have held vigil outside the ECB since October — the longest continuous protest in Europe — runs until Sunday.

Police expect 40,000 people from Thursday for demonstrations that are expected to climax on Saturday. They want to set up a security cordon around the ECB, meaning the camp has to be cleared.

Authorities have already banned several protest actions, fearing “public disorder” after violence at similar events.

The city’s mayor, Claudia Roth, has expressed “serious concern” after police identified some 2,000 potentially violent protesters.

Commerzbank, one of Germany’s top banks, which occupies one of the biggest skyscrapers in Frankfurt, has said it would close from Thursday to Sunday.

As Thursday is a public holiday in Germany, the protest will only actually affect one working day. Many employees also take the Friday off but those who work can go to other locations, the bank said.

Germany’s top bank, Deutsche Bank, declined to comment on its policy, saying only that the lender was “monitoring the situation”.

The star of “The Dictator” ordered his mini-skirted Amazonian bodyguards to point their assault rifles at the press pack outside the ritzy Carlton Hotel before he straddled his humped beast and headed for a nearby cafe.

The media scrum that followed Cohen clogged traffic on the chic promenade as the fictional Middle Eastern dictator shared his thoughts on France’s new President Francois Hollande and the unrest in Syria.

“Hollandaise? Yes, I supported his campaign. I gave him 500,000 euros,” he quipped. But when asked by AFP if he had sent the lightning bolt that struck Hollande’s plane as it flew to Berlin on Tuesday, he denied any involvement.

“There was a lightning? It was not me,” stated the general, who was dressed for the occasion in a multi-coloured jockey’s outfit and brandished a riding crop.

Then he sat at a cafe terrace where he ordered two coffees — one for the camel who refused to drink it — before moving on to a Ralph Lauren store from which he emerged with an orange scarf that he wrapped around his mount’s neck.

The “Ali G”, “Borat” and “Bruno” star, who turned up in military regalia at the Oscars and pretended to pour late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il’s ashes onto an interviewer, has already premiered his movie.

He was in Cannes simply to cause a stir and try to hog the media limelight as the Riviera resort prepared to launch its 65th annual film festival later Wednesday.

Baron Cohen made a previous appearance in Cannes in 2006 when he turned up on the beach to strut his stuff in a “mankini” to publicise “Borat”.

“What they are doing this time is that they are trying to take us on a new national trip, like they’ve done before, but their new one involves accusing President Obama of terrorism,” she said. “The President is a terrorist, a political terrorist, and they’re not just saying this on the sometimes wacky Fox News website, but they are saying this on their prime time programming.”

VanderSloot, the owner of Melaleuca, is one of biggest donors to Restoring Our Future, the super PAC backing Mitt Romney. Quoting a media report, a blog associated with the Obama campaign said VanderSloot was a “litigious, combative, and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”

Following the blog post, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly claimed the President of the United States was trying to “ruin” VanderSloot. However, VanderSloot had been the subject of negative media coverage for months.

“Mr. VanderSloot is now the star of the new Fox News hyped alternate reality conservative media scandal that makes sense to nobody outside the conservative media sphere,” Maddow said.

“The Romney campaign national finance committee co-chair has re-invented this story, to say all of these repercussions for him in his private life and his business started months after he used to say they started,” she added. “He is now saying the stuff he started complaining about back in March actually didn’t start until late April, after the President got involved.”

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Paul announced on Monday that he would no longer be campaigning in states that have not yet held primary elections. But he has not dropped out of the race completely. Instead, Paul hopes to gain delegates at state party conventions.

“So he’s going to do something that no other candidate in history has,” Ralston explained. “He’s going to run backwards. That is, he’s going to go back to these states where he’s been able to infiltrate the county and state conventions and grab as many delegates as he can to the national convention.”

Despite his best efforts, it is nearly impossible for Paul to capture the Republican nomination. However, Paul has stuck in the race in hopes of transforming the Republican Party from within.

“And you could say, well, if you’re not going to win, why bother?” Doherty said. “But for that purpose, it does matter if you’re coming in with 200 delegates vs. 500 delegates. It’s a bigger signal to the world that, we are not just a fringe minority that can be ignored. We are important to the party moving forward. And he and his fans share that desire.”

“I do think, though, that Ron Paul running for president this time has gotten a lot more Ron Paul supporters engaged in Republican Party politics,” Ralston added. “They want to stay inside the tent. They want to be effective. That’s why it’s such a delicate dance for Romney at the convention, because if they feel that they haven’t been at least paid attention to, if not kowtowed to, then I think it could be a problem for him afterward.”

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“None violent drug offenders end up in these prisons for very, very long sentences just because these sheriff’s departments profit from it,” she said.

Louisiana’s incarceration rate is the highest in the country, thanks in part to the large presence of prisons owned by private companies, which are often run by rural sheriffs.

The incarceration rate in Louisiana is triple the rate in Iran, seven times greater than in China, and 10 times more than Germany’s.

“Of course there is a racial angle to this as well,” Kasparian said, “because when it comes to blacks in New Orleans alone, 1 in 14 are behind bars and 1 in 7 are either in prison, on parole or on probation.”

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Even though “nothing is going to happen” because of his support for marriage equality, she still appreciated that Obama took the risk of publicly stating his support.

“It’s just nice to hear that the guy who’s sitting in the big chair in White House supports me and my family,” Lynch said.

She said those opposed to same sex marriage should not be letting their “religious dogma” get in the way of the Golden Rule.

“If there’s anything wrong with me, it has nothing to do with my orientation. I’ve got a lot of flaws. But being gay isn’t one of them.”

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Romney, seeking to make November’s election a referendum on the stuttering economic recovery presided over by Obama, warned Americans would not stand for four more years of “melancholy” economic news.

The former Massachusetts governor accompanied his speech in the battleground state of Iowa with a new advertisement that painted a grim picture of the Obama economy in which unemployed Americans bemoaned their plight.

“A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love,” Romney said in prepared remarks issued by his campaign.

“This is not solely a Democrat or a Republican problem. The issue isn’t who deserves the most blame, it’s who is going to do what it takes to put out the fire,” Romney said.

“The people of Iowa and America have watched President Obama for nearly four years, much of that time with Congress controlled by his own party.

“And rather than put out the spending fire, he has fed the fire. He has spent more and borrowed more,” Romney said.

“The time has come for a president, a leader, who will lead. I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.

“We will stop borrowing unfathomable sums of money we can’t even imagine, from foreign countries we’ll never even visit.”

Romney accuses Obama of inflating the US national debt, which stood at $11.9 trillion in fiscal 2009, the year he took office and is projected to reach $16.4 trillion in fiscal 2012.

Obama also foresees a fourth straight year of budget deficits over $1 trillion.

Democrats, however, say that the explosion in US debt is due largely to deficit-financed wars in Afghanistan launched under the previous administration of Republican president George W. Bush.

They also blame unfunded Bush-era tax cuts for running up the national debt, along with an $800 billion economic stimulus plan framed by Obama in 2009 as the economy slumped into the deepest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith accused Romney of being dishonest about the president’s economic record and of refusing to detail exactly how he would reduce the national debt and the deficit.

“While President Obama has put forward a plan to reduce the national debt by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, Mitt Romney refuses to say what spending cuts or tax increases he’d make to cover the cost of giving $5 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans,” she said.

“Mitt Romney simply wants to return to the same policies that caused the crisis and weakened the middle class… America can’t afford Romney Economics.”

The first alleged victim, identified only as John Doe, filed his lawsuit last week, seeking $2 million and alleging that Travolta grabbed his penis after receiving a massage at a Beverly Hills hotel in January.

Travolta’s heavyweight lawyer Martin Singer dismissed the claim as “a complete fiction and fabrication,” saying the Hollywood A-list actor was on the East Coast on the day in question, January 16.

A few days later the same lawyer, Okorie Okorocha, filed another lawsuit including a second alleged victim, identified only as John Doe #2, this time for an alleged assault in Atlanta, Georgia on January 28.

On Tuesday Okorocha said he had withdrawn the first lawsuit. “Let’s just say we had differences in opinion of how to handle the case and decided to part ways,” he told celebrity bible People magazine.

The notice of dismissal was filed Tuesday in US District Court in Los Angeles, People reported.

Travolta’s lawyer welcomed the news, telling the TMZ celebrity news website: “My client is completely vindicated by Doe #1 dropping his claims and dismissing his lawsuit.

And he said: “We fully expect that my client will similarly be vindicated with respect to Doe #2, as well as with respect to any other person who makes meritless claims against John Travolta.”

“We can’t accept cases under the Hague Convention on abduction if the treaty was not enforced at the time of the alleged wrongful removal or retention,” said State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.

A Guatemalan judge in August 2011 ordered the repatriation of Anyeli Liseth Hernandez Rodriguez, asking the US embassy to find the girl and return her to her natural mother, Loyda Rodriguez.

Anyeli Hernandez, now seven, was abducted in November 2006 and wound up, illegally, with an adopting American couple.

The Hague Convention on child abduction was ratified by Guatemala’s congress in 2007 and went into effect there on January 1, 2008.

Nuland said the “appropriate venue” in the United States for pursuing the case was the state courts.

“They’re the competent organ for holding a full hearing on the merits and the best interests of the child,” Nuland said.

She added the United States remains committed to “ethical” and “transparent” adoption.

“We’re obviously deeply concerned about allegations regarding stolen children and inter-country adoptions wherever these cases come up,” Nuland said.

Guatemalan authorities have prosecuted three people for kidnapping and for placing Anyeli Hernandez up for adoption.

Before 2008, when the new law went into effect, adoptions were a big black-market business in Guatemala that generated some 200 million dollars a year from 5,000 adoptions, 95 percent of which were by American couples.