Yostivanich

“Vio­lence and inse­cu­rity are no longer the main con­cern of most Iraqis, for the first time since the 2003 US-led inva­sion, an opin­ion poll sug­gests. It says Iraqis are much more hope­ful about the future and are increas­ingly pre-occupied with more con­ven­tional wor­ries like the econ­omy and jobs. But Iraqis remain unhappy about the role for­eign pow­ers play in their coun­try, notably Iran, the US and UK. ” That’s good news.

“The head of the US cen­tral bank, Ben Bernanke, has said he expects America’s reces­sion to end this year.” Make sense.

AOL has a new CEO.

What clas­sic Star Wars terms were never actu­ally uttered dur­ing the movie.

Awe­some news, not.

“Email is dead. If your com­pany is rely­ing on email for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion, your com­pany is walk­ing dead in this new econ­omy.” !00% agreed.

“But, in addi­tion, we need to make a few big bets on poten­tial game-changers. I am talk­ing about sys­tems that could give us abun­dant, clean, reli­able elec­trons and drive mas­sive inno­va­tion in big lasers, mate­ri­als sci­ence, nuclear physics and chem­istry that would ben­e­fit, ener­gize and renew many U.S. indus­tries.” Defiantly.

And we won­der why the US falls behind in sci­ence and math test scores?

No duh.

What hap­pens when the FDIC takes over a bank. Really inter­est­ing video.

Really awe­some post con­tra­dict­ing a lot of what we com­monly think about Tibet.

“The leg­en­dar­ily beau­ti­ful Egypt­ian queen Cleopa­tra was part African, says a doc­u­men­tary team who believe they have found the tomb of her sis­ter.” Archae­ol­ogy at work.

“The dis­clo­sure included coun­ter­par­ties to both its credit default swap oper­a­tions and its secu­ri­ties lend­ing busi­nesses, both of which con­tributed heav­ily to A.I.G.’s trou­bles, as well as to munci­pal­i­ties who par­tic­i­pated in cer­tain invest­ment pro­grams. All told, Sunday’s state­ment detailed pay­ments of more than $94 bil­lion, exclud­ing pay­ments to munic­i­pal­i­ties. All were made using gov­ern­ment loans.”

“Trea­sury offi­cials and man­age­ment experts hired by the Obama admin­is­tra­tion qui­etly began comb­ing through Gen­eral Motors’ lat­est down­siz­ing plan in Detroit last week, in a last-minute effort to assess whether more gov­ern­ment aid could make the com­pany viable, or whether the bet­ter choice was a man­aged bank­ruptcy.” My vote is bankruptcy.

Never knew that the OS X wid­gets were just basic html/css/javascript files.

Waste of ink.

The BBC reports on what Iraq is like currently.

“The broad pack­age of mea­sures to be announced Mon­day includes $730 mil­lion from the stim­u­lus plan that will imme­di­ately reduce small-business lend­ing fees and increase the gov­ern­ment guar­an­tee on some Small Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion loans to 90 per­cent. The gov­ern­ment also will take aggres­sive steps to boost bank liq­uid­ity with more than $10 bil­lion aimed at unfreez­ing the sec­ondary credit mar­ket, accord­ing to offi­cials briefed on the plan who demanded anonymity to avoid pre-empting the president’s announcement.”

“In addi­tion Rose said that MMS and video record­ing would not be present in this release nor the abil­ity to run back­ground appli­ca­tions. Finally Rose made a men­tion the Palm Pre and how Apple will match all the fea­tures of the hand­set.” SO what does that mean??

Well I guess that’s some form of good news, though the bal­ance fell 20% since Jan­u­ary of 2008.

“A new audio mes­sage said to be from al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden accuses mod­er­ate Arab lead­ers of con­spir­ing with the West against Mus­lims.” <sar­casm> Never would have thought this would be com­ing from him.</sarcasm>

“Oil min­is­ters from the 12 Opec coun­tries meet­ing in the Aus­trian cap­i­tal Vienna have decided to keep oil pro­duc­tion at cur­rent lev­els.” FYI.

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