• $850
  million amount AOL spent on Bebo, a Facebook wannabe, when they bought it two years ago
• chump
  change amount AOL likely sold Bebo for today; it was a terrible investment for the company source

• $1.4 million in donations from the oil and gas industry source

• I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown in this case a $20 billion dollar shakedown.
• Rep. Joe Barton • Saying the kind of thing that will not win him many fans amongst people offended by the oil spill. BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, who went into the Congressional hearing today expecting a public flogging, instead got that starting out. Unbelievable. Save the apologies for a company that isn’t responsible for destroying the gulf, Joe. That money’s going to help people whose lives were destroyed, remember. source

• 17.2% dip in new home builds between April and May
• 10% dip in future home construction contracts source

• » What the heck happened? Simply put, home sales were artificially inflated by an $8,000 homebuyer tax credit. As soon as the tax credit went away, the bottom completely fell out. In some areas of the country, home sales are down 20 percent from May 2009, when the worst of the financial crisis had ended.

Knight News Challenge Winners, In Brief from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

• From small news projects to ambitious advertising products, there’s some cool stuff here. Among the winners of this year’s Knight News Challenge – which means that the Knight Foundation gives tech-leaning journalists money to chase their dreams – are the Windy Citizen (which has a pretty cool real-time ads platform), CityTracking (which hopes to make city visualizations interesting and embeddable), The Cartoonist (which hopes to make editorial cartoon games), and LocalWiki (which is seriously the kind of idea we’ve heard bandied about more than a few times). Oh, and lots more. Check out the video and the full list to get the scoop. source

• 9.8% increase on the London stock exchange today source

• At the end of the day, ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t have to present any evidence,’ with all respect to Mr. Cooper, doesn’t cut it.
• Lawyer Ted Olson • Arguing during the Proposition 8 trial yesterday against defense lawyer Charles Cooper, who used the phrase “you don’t have to have evidence” to prove that gay marriage is illegal. Now – we could be wrong here, but something tells us that’s a pretty crappy argument to make in any courtroom, in any case. The judge, by the way, was pretty tough with his questioning – on both sides of the coin. source