What medical leave ? Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance at a Cupertino City Council meeting yesterday to announce plans for a major Apple expansion: a spaceship-like structure that would house an estimated 12,000 employees. Jobs presented renderings of a proposed 150-acre Northern California campus built around a massive…
Continue reading …Suddenly, the SATs seem like a leisurely way to spend a Saturday. Chinese students and their families have turned preparation for the country’s college entrance exam into a national obsession. Some students study hooked up to oxygen tanks in an effort to improve concentration, girls take birth control to prevent…
Continue reading …Social media’s hottest life-wrecker has claimed another one: A Pennsylvania social media specialist was fired after tweeting that her government co-workers leave work early to play golf, reports the Morning Call . Vanessa Williams got a pink slip from the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp. in part because of a tweet…
Continue reading …Americans for Prosperity hit a real sore spot with its latest flier—which was designed to look like an eviction notice and plastered to doors in the Delray neighborhood of Detroit—but the conservative group isn’t apologizing. “It was meant to startle people,” the group’s Michigan director tells the Detroit…
Continue reading …Indiana University sophomore Lauren Spierer hasn’t been seen since Friday, and family and friends are showing how social media has transformed missing persons’ cases, reports the Washington Post . They’ve launched Facebook groups and Twitter posters and even gotten celebs such as Alyssa Milano and Ryan Seacrest to tweet her photo….
Continue reading …Mark Begich delivered a sharp jab at Sarah Palin yesterday, saying, in effect, that he didn’t consider her an Alaskan anymore. Asked about Palin’s insistence that he push to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling as part of a debt ceiling deal, Begich replied, “Someone who quit…
Continue reading …Connecticut might’ve decriminalized marijuana, but it’s going to criminalize fake pot: A bill passed this week would classify synthetic marijuana and the herb Salvia diviorum as a controlled substance that is illegal to possess. Synthetic products could be legally sold in stores until the federal government reclassified them in March.
Continue reading …The eventual withdrawal of US and NATO troops from Afghanistan is necessary, but it cannot be hasty or ill-planned, writes Henry Kissinger in the Washington Post . The conflict is often seen as an American one, but this is truly an international problem. A bad handoff “is a prescription for wider…
Continue reading …
Congressman engulfed in scandal over images sent over internet and his wife reportedly tell family of pregnancy Huma Abedin, the wife of the Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner, who is currently engulfed in a cringe-inducing scandal over sexually suggestive images of himself he sent over the internet, is reportedly pregnant with her first baby. According to the New York Times , the couple have told family and intimate friends that Abedin is pregnant. The news comes out just two days after Weiner, a rising star within the Democratic party, made a grovelling televised apology in which he admitted he had sent semi-clad photographs of himself to at least six different women, some of which had occurred after his marriage. The politician at first denied he had sent via Twitter a photograph of himself in his underpants. For a week he claimed that his account had been breached by a hacker. Even within a party sadly accustomed to sex scandals – the Democratic governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign after it was revealed that he enlisted the services of prostitutes and the former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is currently facing charges that he used campaign money to hush up an affair – the Weiner scandal has been excruciatingly embarrassing in its detail. Yet the New York representative has doggedly refused to resign. He is currently engaging in a round of calls apologising to top Democratic figures in an attempt to save his political career. Abedin is herself a prominent figure in Democratic politics. She has been a close aide to Hillary Clinton since the 2008 presidential nomination race and she continues to work for the secretary of state. As news of the pregnancy broke, the two women were in the air bound for north Africa on an official visit. Anthony Weiner United States US politics Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Two new chemical elements have been officially added to the periodic-table torment of high school kids everywhere. But as-yet-unnamed Nos. 114 and 116 aren’t like their new buddies carbon, gold, or zinc—they were created by slamming two lighter elements together in the hopes they’d stick, said a chair on…
Continue reading …