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The Facebook boys and girls ring the opening bell for yesterday's Nasdaq jamboree from their headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. True, it didn't turn out to be the opening bell for Facebook's IPO exactly, but maybe the SEC will get to the bottom of that little glitch.by KenIt's not shame to admit it that you just couldn't resist shelling out some of your hard-earned simoleons for some of that prized Facebook paper. Or not much of a shame anyways. Who doesn't want to be part of such an enterprise?The Washington Post's Hayley Tsukayama reports:Many in New York and Silicon Valley had called Facebook's stock sale on the Nasdaq the initial public offering of the year. The size was enormous at $16 billion, the third largest in U.S. history. And the images of newly minted billionaires Zuckerberg and ...
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By Andrew JonesSaturday, May 19, 2012 20:31 EDT
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman once again pushed back on the notion that America needs to engage in massive suspending cuts now to deal with the country’s debt Friday evening.
Appearing on CNN’s Up Front With Erin Burnett, Krugman rejected Burnett’s premise of advocating for austerity measures to tackle America’s debt and deficit, offering his usual recommendations for more spending.
“The fact of the matter is...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 19:16 EDT
The water supply to tens of thousands of households near Tokyowas cut off Saturday after local checks found it was contaminated with a cancer-causing chemical.
The city of Noda, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from central Tokyo, said it had stopped supplies to a major part of the city. Most of the neighbouring city of Kashiwa also has no tap water supply.
Water supplies have been cut to a total of 210,000 househol...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 19:13 EDT
President Barack Obama, fresh from easing US sanctions on Myanmar, said at the G8 summit Saturday that world powers would do all they could to promote the country’s political reforms.
Obama lifted some investment restrictions on the nominally civilian-ruled nation this week, hoping to reward President Thein Sein for taking steps toward political change, and to encourage the government to go further.
He said at th...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 19:06 EDT
Hundreds of protesters marched in the Philippine capital Saturday to demand a ban on pop phenomenon Lady Gaga’s upcoming concerts, claiming her lyrics were anti-Christian.
About 50 riot police blocked a major Manila intersection to stop the marchers from reaching the shopping mall complex where the American singer is due to perform on May 21-22.
Lady Gaga has already faced opposition elsewhere on the Asia leg of ...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 18:59 EDT
The first tropical storm of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane seasonformed Saturday off the southeastern US coast with winds of 45 miles (75 kilometers) per hour, US weather forecasters said.
Dubbed “Alberto,” the storm was 140 miles (225 kilometers) southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, moving southwest at a speed of three miles (six kilometers) per hour, the National Hurricane Center.
It posed no immediate threat ...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 18:43 EDT
Dozens of Palestinian olive trees and grape vines were destroyed and anti-Arab graffiti was daubed in groves of the West Bank villageof Beit Omar, residents said on Saturday.
The villagers said the attack had taken place on Friday night or early Saturday and blamed it on Jewish settlers of nearby Bat Ayin settlement, which lies north of the town of Hebron.
Hebrew graffiti reading “death to Arabs” and “price tag” ...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 18:37 EDT
US actress Jessica Chastain, in Cannes for her role in a film vying for the top prize, said a controversy about the lack of female directors in the line-up for the Palme d’Or was pointless.
“I think it’s silly,” she told AFP in an interview. “I think a film should be judged on the film and not on the sex of the person who directed the film.”
Chastain, a love interest in John Hillcoat’s “Lawless” Prohibition-era ...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 18:33 EDT
The Cannes Film Festival hit back at charges of sexism in its official line-up Saturday, saying it would continue to select pictures based solely on their merits.
In response to a mounting row over the all-male selection for the competition at the world’s top cinema showcase, the event’s board said in a statement that it was committed to diversity, but on its own terms.
“The Festival de Cannes – in order to maint...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 18:18 EDT
More than 20,000 people on Saturday joined a march through the centre of the German financial capital Frankfurt, police said, in a protest against European austerity programmes.
It was the only demonstration of the anti-capitalist movement known as “Blockupy Frankfurt” authorised by the city and justice authorities.
Previous protests over the past four days were banned by city officials and led to mass arrests.
O...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 18:07 EDT
Dozens of Russian artists with brooms in hand carted their most expressive works across the boulevards of Moscow on Saturday in a show of exasperation at Vladimir Putin’s return to a third Kremlin term.
Several thousand Muscovites joined them in a second such intellectual walk in a week. More than 10,000 had supported a group of writers last weekend on a quiet stroll along the very same streets.
“I got a call fro...
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The good old days, when Vitter & his GOP cronies LOVED the FedOn May 9th, my sister's birthday (which I forgot), we looked at how deranged Confederate obstructionist David Vitter was doing his bit to undermine the United States by filibustering-- randomly-- President Obama's bipartisan nominees for the Federal Reserve Board. Thursday I was out to dinner with two friends at Gattopardo who happen to be friends with Harvard economist Jeremy Stein and they informed me that the Senate had just overcome Vitter's filibuster-- on Stein and fellow nominee Jerome Powell. 24 rabid right obstructionists voted against confirming Stein and 21 voted against confirming Powell. Blunt, Boozman, McCain and Portman voted against Stein but gave up on opposing Powell. [Vermont Independent Bernie Sander voted a...
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The board of the NAACP, the “nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization,” endorsed marriage equality at a meeting this afternoon. The move comes 10 days after President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage.
The NAACP’s move comes as attitudes about gays and lesbians in the African American community are changing rapidly. A recent poll found that 54% of African Americans supported President Obama’s recent decision.
Maxim Thorne, formerly of the NAACP, broke the news over Twitter:
The NAACP Board of Directors has just endorsed marriage equality unequivocally. Only two opposed! An historic moment.
— Maxim Thorne (@Maximthorne) May 19, 2012
Since Obama’s announcement, numerous influential political figures — including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Assistan...
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JR: It’s remarkable how warm it was globally in April considering that we were only just coming out of a double dip La Niña. If we don’t triple dip, we’ll set more temperature records soon. Indeed, NOAA models predict a good chance of an El Niño forming in the late summer, which would make it quite likely next year would be the hottest on record. As for April, you’ll note it was hot in the ‘wrong’ places again — over much of the tundra, which is a carbon time bomb.
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for April 2012. The most notable extremes were the warmth observed across Russia, the United States, Alaska, and parts of the Middle East and eastern Europe. There were no land areas with large-scale cold conditions of note. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) .
– J...
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By: Jason EasleyMay 19, 2012see more posts by Jason Easley
Because President Obama is pushing for more financial regulation and reform, Wall Street is going all in on Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. Now Obama is fighting back.
Here’s the video:
The president described the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and said,
Since then, we’ve recovered taxpayer dollars that were used to stabilize troubled banks. And we’ve put in place Wall Street reform with smarter, tougher, commonsense rules that serve one primary purpose: to prevent a crisis like that from ever happening again. And yet, for the past two years, too many Republicans in Congress and an army of financial industry lobbyists have actually been waging an all-out battle to delay, defund, and dismant...
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The Lindsey Graham School Of Negotiation
Gates: Not Everyone ‘Would Have Made The Same Decision’ To Get Bin Laden
House Passes GOP Measure Backing Indefinite Detention
NEWS FLASH
Congressmen seek to ‘legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences.’ |
BuzzFeed reports that Rep. Mark Thornberry (R-TX) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) have inserted a provision into the latest defense authorization bill that would “‘strike the current ban on domestic dissemination’ of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon.” The proposal would “give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public.”
By Judd Legum on May 19, 2012 at ...
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No one likes the mandate, which was always just a bad conservative Republican plan about how to use market principles to finance health care reform. Once pusillanimous, compromise-for-the-sake-of-compromise and conservative Democrats embraced the idea-- which, of course, is a feature of RomneyCare in Massachusetts, the GOP abandoned it. And the mandate is the financial edifice upon which Obama's health care bill is built. It shouldn't have been. Progressives warned from the beginning that single-payer (Medicare For All)-- or, as a fallback position, a public option-- is what the Democrats should have fought for. But corrupt corporate Democrats catered the the GOP-- and for what?-- and mandates were baked into the equation. Now, congressional Republicans are campaigning on tossing out the e...
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Scrutiny of Mitt Romney's Character Reveals Psychopathic Tendencies
Bernie Sanders
The American people do not want Wall Street involved in a gambling casino, waging risky bets... threatening the entire economy
...
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TD Ameritrade Founder Joe RickettsThis week, the New York Times reported that Joe Ricketts, a right-wing billionaire and founder of TD Ameritrade, is soliciting multi-million dollar ad proposals to attack President Obama. One such proposal, leaked to the paper, was a $10 million, racially-charged campaign entitled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End his Spending for Good.” The proposal, which center on Rev. Jeremiah Wright, suggests hiring an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to break down Obama’s image as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”
Ricketts moved quickly to publicly reject the plan after it leaked. His spokesman said it “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggesti...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 11:05 EDT
US police and federal investigators arrested two men over the killings of two Chinese graduate students which shocked Los Angeles last month, officials said.
The men were detained in separate operations in south LA and Palmdale, north of the city, by teams including the LA Police Department (LAPD), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
University of Southern California (USC) students Ming Qu and Ying Wu, bot...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 11:03 EDT
Facebook’s initial public offering will make lots of its staff in California rich — and should therefore help the perennially cash-strapped state fill a whopping $16 billion budget hole.
According to official estimates, the record-setting IPO Friday will make a windfall of some $2.1 billion dollars for California, whose governor just this week proposed a series of spending cuts to help cut its deficit.
The extra ...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 11:00 EDT
A special US military tribunal at Guantanamo is weighing whether to hold separate trials for five accused plotters of the September 11 attacks, a defense lawyer said.
The men, who are being held at Guantanamo Bay, were formally charged earlier this month with crimes that include murder and terrorism. They face the death penalty if convicted for their roles in the Al-Qaeda attacks that claimed 2,976 lives in New Y...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 10:54 EDT
US President Barack Obama urged members of Congress on Saturday to defend Wall Street reform, arguing the recovering US economy cannot take the risk of lax oversight over the financial sector.
“That’s why it’s so important that members of Congress stand on the side of reform, not against it,” the president said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
“Because we can’t afford to go back to an era of weak regulat...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 10:50 EDT
Israelis this week mark Jerusalem Day, celebrating the “reunification” of the Holy City, but 45 years on, the contrast between quality of life in the Jewish west and the Arab east remain stark.
The status of Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel captured the eastern sector of the city during the 1967 war and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the int...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 10:44 EDT
Some 800,000 metalworkers in the German state of Bade-Wurtemberg won a 4.3 percent pay rise in marathon negotiations, their union said on Saturday, raising hopes that years of wage restraint are ending.
The regional accord, the first to be signed in Germany this year, sets a benchmark for wage negotiations in other regions.
Trade union IG Metall had demanded a rise of 6.5 percent over 12 months, pressuring busine...
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By Agence France-PresseSaturday, May 19, 2012 10:37 EDT
The California-based company SpaceX on Saturday scrubbed the launch of its Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station at the last second due to a rocket engine problem.
The abort came a half-second before liftoff due to high pressure in the center engine of the Falcon 9 rocket, forcing a shutdown of the launch attempt. The next try is expected May 22 at 3:44 am (0744 GMT).
“This is not failure. We abor...
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By Charles Arthur, The GuardianSaturday, May 19, 2012 10:33 EDT
Comparing public user engagement suggests that Google+ is still a niche pursuit, despite Google claiming it has 170 million people signed up – while Pinterest’s attraction remains high.
Away from all the hubbub over that other social network, how is Google+ – described by Larry Page and others as the new “social spine” of the company – doing?
As far as user numbers go, swimmingly: Page said that it has cr...
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By David FergusonSaturday, May 19, 2012 10:32 EDT
Friday night on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” host Bill Maher devoted a section of his weekly “New Rules” segment to Liberty Universty, saying, “New Rule: You can’t expect me to believe anything Mitt Romney said last week at Liberty University because a) he’s a liar, and b) Liberty University isn’t really a university.”
He characterized presumptive Republican nominee former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA)’s speech to the gradua...
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By The GuardianSaturday, May 19, 2012 10:23 EDT
Lawyer says men are ‘in shock’ over allegations they tried to make a Molotov cocktail ahead of Nato summit protests
Three Nato protesters, arrested in a late night raid on Wednesday, have been charged on terrorism-related offences.
Police claim the charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism and possession of an explosive or incendiary device, are the result of a month-long investi...
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by Adam James
Ever hear the one about the Icelandic geothermal systems engineer and the Kenyan project developer who walk into a bar? As interesting this meeting might be, it’s unlikely to happen anywhere but in a bad renewable energy joke. Or at a geothermal conference.
Enter the Clean Energy Solutions Center, a new website designed to make it easier for these kind of encounters to happen — helping spread valuable experience to emerging clean energy markets around the world.
Serving as a clearinghouse for clean energy information, the Solutions Center offers stakeholders a wide range of tools, including over 1,300 resources (reports, presentations, and models), webinars and online training, and sharing experiences.
The Solutions Center one of the eleven initiatives launched by the Clean E...
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