A 75-year old Georgian woman who was scavenging for copper to sell sliced through an underground cable and cut off Internet services to all of neighboring Armenia. Pulling up unused copper cables for scrap is a common means of making money in the former Soviet Union. Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours. Maybe they even talked to each other.
98 percent of cassava chips exported from Thailand went to China to make biofuel, allowing China to claim to be the world leader in green energy. The problem: Thai exports of cassava chips have increased nearly fourfold since 2008, and the price of cassava has roughly doubled, which means the starchy root which has long been a staple of the diet for rich and poor is increasingly out of reach for those with lower incomes. China was wise enough to stop using its own corn for biofuel due to the spike in cost that resulted.
Early reaction to the publication of a paper by physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory hints at the existence of a previously unknown elementary particle. Is it the Higgs boson? No, it is not, as Tommaso Dorigo shows, so you should be skeptical about the sensationalism this kind of thing often brings.
Google Europe managed to generate $7 billion in profits yet paid tax on only $50+ million. How is that possible? They're headquartered in Ireland to take advantage of its low 12.5% tax rate but even then get to duck out of paying much.
More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined.The number one in employer in Silicon Valley, the home of high technology for the world, is not Intel or Google or Apple, it's the federal government. And the California state government is the number two. In total, California has 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing.
Louis Farrakhan, the controversial Nation of Islam leader, defended Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and said demons were to blame for President Barack Obama's assault on Gadhafi.Sure, it can be confusing that Democrats have applied the fuzzy-wuzzy 'freedom fighters' label to Libyans to rationalize a Democratic president going all neo-con and attacking the leader of a sovereign nation which is no threat to anyone outside its own borders... but demons?
It used to be that natural ingredients were good, but as western civilization has gotten more concerned about health, immune diseases and allergies have gone way up. Wheat is listed as a 'known allergen' by the US Department of Agriculture. Now 131,000 pounds of pizza products shipped to Trader Joe's stores nationwide have been recalled because they contain wheat. Yes, wheat. The product that set off the agricultural revolution in Europe and made them world leaders. The product that fed the Roman Empire. The product we subsidize to keep it profitable for farmers because food is a strategic resource.
G.E., General Electric Corp., which owns NBC News, generated a profit of $14.2 billion last year. It's taxes paid for 2010? $0.Did NBC mention that? They did not. So the next time you think that the media is only biased when the network is Fox News, keep that in mind. Did ABC cover the story? You betcha, of course they covered a competitor.
If you have used Twitter, you either love it or hate it. Regardless of how you feel on the subject, social media sites, like Twitter, have become a source of news for some, though if you think people only watch news on television they already agree with, you can imagine what their Twitter feeds are like.John Timmer at Ars Technica discusses some Yahoo! researchers who say they can create an automated system that identifies newsworthy events and judges their reliability with an accuracy of nearly 90 percent.
The events that have afflicted Japan since the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami of March 11 are all too well known, but the events that occurred before and the even more ominous events that may occur in the near future are less known.
