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24 Sep 2010 13:33

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U.S.: North Dakota lake gobbles up buildings, towns

  • over the last twenty years, North Dakota’s aptly-named “Devil’s Lake” has almost quadrupled in size, and will probably continue doing so for the next ten years. It’s swallowed hundreds of buildings, thousands of acres, and even two towns. The problem lies with the fact that it’s a “closed basin,” meaning there are no natural waterways by which rainwater can flow out of the lake. So, it just gets bigger and bigger. For an idea of how big, check out AP’s interactive map. source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

24 Sep 2010 09:29

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U.S.: HIV still a huge problem for gay males in major cities

  • 19% of gay men (in a new study of 21 major cities and HIV) have the disease – and nearly half don’t know it
  • 28% of black men in the study had HIV, and over half of them didn’t know they had it; the number was lower for other races
  • 63%of young people in the study were unaware of their HIV-positive status – a number that went down with age source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Sep 2010 21:15

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U.S.: Why Facebook broke: A configuration error, a feedback loop

  • Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it.
  • Facebook employee Robert Johnson • Explaining why Facebook was so broken today. Simply put, there was a configuration error so huge that it caused the entire site to fall over itself. It created a feedback loop in a cluster of databases and couldn’t handle the number of requests. All engineers could do to stop it was turn off the site for two and a half hours. That’s right. The entire site. It’s not often that Facebook crashes at all, let alone in the middle of the day on a weekday. That was epic, eh? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Sep 2010 18:39

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U.S.: Whoa, this is heavy, Doc: U.S. to get progressively fatter

  • 75% of America will be obese or overweight by 2020 source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Sep 2010 10:35

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U.S.: Who’s richer, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg? Click and find out!

  • $6.9 billion the value of Mark Zuckerberg’s portfolio, according to Forbes
  • $6.1 billion the value of Steve Jobs; note that this is mostly on paper source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

22 Sep 2010 21:00

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U.S.: Not a “contract,” a “pledge”: The GOP’s new doohicky to America

  • 21 pages of trying to relive a fleeting footnote in history source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

22 Sep 2010 18:25

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U.S.: California city lacks any oversight whatsoever

  • $56 million a year in illegal taxation in one city source
  • » According to an audit by State Controller John Chiang, the City Council of Bell, CA approved millions of dollars in fraudulent taxation in 2007, mostly for the benefit of former City Administrator Robert Rizzo. The charges include $93,000 to pay off Rizzo’s personal debts, $10 million to one of Rizzo’s business partners, and $1 million in pay raises for Rizzo and his assistant. The taxes were raised without voter approval and lacking any substantive debate on the part of the city council, Chiang says. The best part? The audit isn’t even done yet!
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

22 Sep 2010 11:06

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U.S.: Bishop Eddie Long’s allegations shocking, contradictory

It’s weird when some of the staunchest anti-homosexuality figures are accused of homosexuality. Megachurch leader Bishop Eddie Long could be in huge trouble. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

22 Sep 2010 10:20

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U.S.: Wright County Egg Founder sorry his eggs made you sick

  • We were horrified to learn that our eggs may have made people sick. We apologize to everyone who may have been sickened by eating our eggs.
  • Wright County Egg founder Austin DeCoster • In prepared remarks for Congress, where he’ll speak today to explain how his company is responsible for so many salmonella-tainted eggs. His company’s barns were infested with all sorts of disgusting things that we won’t repeat here so as not to turn you off of eggs entirely. Partly because of this, there were traces of salmonella in the barns years before there was actually an outbreak. Also, there was another outbreak due to the same company way back in the late ’80s. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Sep 2010 20:53

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U.S.: Obesity is expensive, but it’s way more expensive for women

  • $4,879 the yearly cost of being obese for women
  • $2,646 the yearly cost of being obese for men source
  • » Why the disparity?: Apparently, it’s because overweight women tend to make less than thin women do, but men suffer from no similar weight tax on their income. The really scary thing, by the way, is that once life expectancy is factored in, the numbers become significantly higher – $8,365 for women and $6,518 for men. Yikes.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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