• 8/10 missionaries allowed to leave Haiti freely source

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• At 6.8, this quake is nearly as strong as the one that turned Haiti into a pile of rubble. Here’s a map. More details on the quake as we get them. This literally just happened.
• Update: The A.P. (grumble) reports that the quake was strong enough to shake buildings in Beijing for a minute, despite its relatively long distance away.

• 600,000 unique visitors a month for the service, which is a Twitter button service along the lines of TweetMeme
• $20,000 the starting price for what’s a valuable piece of real estate due to the commonly-used name source

• The future of electric cars may have been on the plane that crashed in this Silicon Valley neighborhood. Three Tesla Motors employees were on board, and they all died. “We are withholding their identities as we work with the relevant authorities to notify the families,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said. “Our thoughts and prayers are with them. Tesla is a small, tightly knit company, and this is a tragic day for us.” The crash created a huge power outage in the region, which made a horribly depressing situation even worse. source

• The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.
• New York Times journalist David Leonhardt • In an analysis piece describing why the stimulus program actually worked. The numbers are somewhat inconsistent, but he points out in his article that yes, the stimulus has actually improved the job picture. People disagree on the details and Republicans will use it as a good excuse to trash Obama, but the numbers, Leonhardt argues, favor Obama. One point worth noting: In most worldwide financial crises this century, it generally takes five years for jobs to bounce back to normal numbers. Obama’s already doing better than that, Leonhardt says. source

• 103 number of sponsors Glenn Beck has lost as a result of the continuing boycott
• five number of days the U.K. broadcast of his show ran without any ads source

• Sure took them a while, didn’t it? The arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the reported No. 2 in the Taliban (who’s such a big figure that we don’t even have a photo of him) was met with muted response from Pakistan yesterday, but today, they finally came clean. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, referred to it as an “important arrest,” but didn’t say much else (out of fear?). source

• 1.5+ million jobs have been saved already, according to Obama’s chief economic adviser, who used a mathematical formula
• 500,000 jobs have been saved so far, according to the CEO of Onvia, a contractor-advising company that tracks government spending source