Daily News Channel
Connie and Donald McCracken were watching CNN one evening last week when they learned of the tragic death of actress Natasha Richardson from a head injury. Immediately, their minds turned to their 7-year-old daughter, Morgan, who was upstairs getting ready for bed.
The buzz on Monday afternoon in the newsroom of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was not the usual cacophony of clacking keys, phone interviews and news meetings. Instead, it was the sound of reporters putting to bed their final stories, sifting through receipts to prepare their final expense reports, feeding years of reporting notes into an industrial-size shredding bin and tidying away the mementos of their P-I careers in cardboard boxes
On a Saturday morning, Colleen Seifert woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure.
In the middle of decrying the misdeeds of the financial firm AIG, President Obama cracked a joke. “Excuse me,” he said Monday, after coughing into the microphone.
His colleagues call him the Flying Dutchman because of all the time Yvo de Boer spends in the air, traveling from one world capital to another as he tries to stitch together a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions — and possible save the world. As the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , de Boer is the U.N.’s point man for the ongoing global effort to plan a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The deadline for a new treaty is coming up fast — at the U.N
Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail. Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people’s lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voice mail.
Was it worth it, Mr. Madoff
For families affected by cancer, the phone number is easy to remember: 1-800-ACS-2345. The letters stand for the American Cancer Society, and dialing the number takes you to the ACS’s National Cancer Information Center in Austin, Texas. The call center fields about a million calls a year, offering answers questions both simple and complex, from “Where can I get help with transportation when I can’t drive to chemo appointments?” to “How do I find insurance if my illness forces me to quit my job?” Half the calls coming into the center deal with paying for treatment, either because lifetime limits on policies are quickly reached — cancer is one of the five most costly medical conditions in the U.S., according to the ACS — or because the patient is struggling to maintain coverage in the face of rising premiums and accumulating co-pay costs.
Trains and text messages made a deadly combination when two locomotives collided head-on last year near Los Angeles, California, witnesses told an investigative panel this week. Metrolink commuter train engineer Robert Sanchez missed a stop signal while trading text messages with a friend on September 12, leading to a collision with a Union Pacific freight train that killed Sanchez and 24 other people in Chatsworth, California.
If early last September you’d parked outside Lehman Brothers’ Manhattan headquarters with a cell-phone scanner and listened only to some of the “chatter” coming out of Lehman’s front office, you almost certainly would have realized that Lehman was going under. But to understand the wider consequences, how capitalism was about to do a somersault into the watery abyss, you would have needed to understand how Lehman fit into the global financial system