Three year old Missouri boy found after being lost in the boonies for some 50 hours.
Thirsty, dirty and tired after spending two days and nights barely clothed in the wet, chilly woods of Mark Twain National Forest, 3-year-old Joshua Childers was ready to go home. The boy was lying on the ground of a hollow near a creek bottom Wednesday afternoon when a volunteer searcher spied his bare bottom. “Hey, bud!” called out Donnie Halpin, a 57-year-old construction worker from nearby Fredericktown, who wasn’t sure whether the grimy figure was even alive. But Joshua sat right up and grinned at his rescuer. “You ready to go home?” Halpin asked. “Yeah,” said Joshua.
Highly sensitive details of a US military missile air defence system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay. The test launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq. The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin – who designed and built the system.
General Motors disclosed Thursday that it was running through its cash reserves faster than ever as it barrels toward a June 1 deadline to cut debt and expenses or else file for bankruptcy protection. G.M. said it lost $6 billion in the first quarter as its sales around the world fell 40 percent and revenue was cut nearly in half. But the most concerning number is the $10.2 billion in cash that G.M. depleted in three months, the equivalent of $113 million a day. That is nearly twice the company’s rate of cash burn in the fourth quarter.
Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a ”malfunctioning” business model. Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an “epochal” debate over whether to charge. “That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal’s experience,” he said. (snip) “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
Hawaii’s state Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill Wednesday to celebrate “Islam Day” — over the objections of a few lawmakers who said they didn’t want to honor a religion connected to Sept. 11, 2001. The Senate’s two Republicans argued that a minority of Islamic extremists have killed many innocents in terrorist attacks. “I recall radical Islamists around the world cheering the horrors of 9/11. That is the day all civilized people of all religions should remember,” said Republican Sen. Fred Hemmings to the applause of more than 100 people gathered in the Senate to oppose a separate issue — same-sex civil unions.
About 160 instructors and others get salaries for doing nothing while their job fitness is reviewed. They collect roughly $10 million a year, even as layoffs are considered because of a budget gap. For seven years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has paid Matthew Kim a teaching salary of up to $68,000 per year, plus benefits. His job is to do nothing. Every school day, Kim’s shift begins at 7:50 a.m., with 30 minutes for lunch, and ends when the bell at his old campus rings at 3:20 p.m. He is to take off all breaks, school vacations and holidays, per a district agreement with the teacher’s union. At no time is he to be given any work by the district or show up at school.
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The 2008 AIG bonus pool just keeps getting larger and larger. In a response to detailed questions from Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the company has offered a third assessment of exactly how much it paid out in bonuses last year. And the new number, offered in a document submitted to Cummings on May 1, is the highest figure the company has disclosed to date. AIG now says it paid out more than $454 million in bonuses to its employees for work performed in 2008. That is nearly four times more than the company revealed in late March when asked by POLITICO to detail its total bonus payments.
Civilian air-traffic computer networks have been penetrated multiple times in recent years, including an attack that partially shut down air-traffic data systems in Alaska, according to a government report. The report, which was released by the Transportation Department’s inspector general Wednesday, warned that the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization efforts are introducing new vulnerabilities that could increase the risk of cyberattacks on air-traffic control systems. The FAA is slated to spend approximately $20 billion to upgrade its air-traffic control system over the next 15 years.
No recession here as beer sales help Anheuser-Busch/InBev post huge profits.
Anheuser-Busch InBev nearly doubled its profit in the first quarter as it sold more beer and reached a deal to sell its Korean brewery. The world’s largest brewer posted a profit of $716 million for the quarter, up from $373 million a year ago, reflecting the Belgian brewer’s November acquisition of St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch.
A bill designating May 22 as “Harvey Milk Day” in California passed a state senate committee on Wednesday. Six Democrats and one Republican voted in favor of the bill, and two Republicans voted against it. A conservative group calls it “one of the worst bills in California history,” but a homosexual advocacy group says the bill will explain “how important Harvey is to all Californians.” Harvey Milk, an openly homosexual man elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was shot and killed on November 27, 1978 – along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone – by another supervisor who had recently resigned and wanted his job back.
Proposed congressional legislation would demand up to two years in prison for those whose electronic speech is meant to “coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person.” Instead of prison, perhaps we should say gulag. The proposal by Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Los Angeles, would never pass First Amendment muster, unless the U.S. Constitution was altered without us knowing. So Sanchez, and the 14 other lawmakers who signed on to the proposal, are grandstanding to show the public they care about children and are opposed to cyberbullying.
Quote of the day.
I’m sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we’re Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration!
-Hillary Clinton