Daily Briefing
Deep buzz for the content-deprived
Every weekday, while you get showered and dressed, we pluck these dewy- fresh, breaking stories from the info-clogged byways of the datasphere. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and stoke up on everything you need to know, or at least enough to fake it.
On the 20th anniversay of the Soviet Union's collapse, former President Mikhail Gorbachev says the U.S. should have backed his promotion of perestroika, or political and economic reforms. He says that Vladimir Putin is dragging Russia backward...
The tea party isn’t about to make room for the new protesters on the block.
Big tea party groups have launched an attack against the Occupy Wall Street protests, challenging the line that the anti-corporate uprising is the “the tea party of the left.” Tea partiers and their allies are looking to de-legitimize the protests circulating in the anti-Wall Street crowds, hunting for evidence of union ties, fringe rhetoric and bad behavior — ranging from news of arrests, to recordings of incendiary speeches, to tales of littering, drug use and debauchery...
The new diet soda Dr. Pepper Ten claims it's "not for women." From Marlboro to Axe to Levi's Ex-Girlfriend Jeans, see other products that are targeted for testosterone...
United against Barack Obama, Senate Republicans voted Tuesday night to kill the jobs package the president had spent weeks campaigning for across the country, a stinging loss at the hands of lawmakers opposed to stimulus-style spending and a tax increase on the very wealthy...
Protests are usually messy, noisy and often confused. But they have produced some of the most important changes in American history — the Sons of Liberty, the abolitionists, the populists, the labor movements, the civil rights movements, the anti-war movements and many others. All were first attacked as rabble and mob rule. But our democracy would be far more fragile without them — seldom more so than during economic crises...
After his dramatic rescue from a mine last year, Jimmy Sánchez traveled the world, cruising the Greek islands, visiting Britain, Israel, Los Angeles, Disney World — all paid for by people who were moved by the Chilean miners’ story of courage and perseverance. But today Mr. Sánchez, like many of the 33 miners who survived 69 days nearly a half-mile underground, is jobless and at wits’ end...
On Nov. 22, 1995, Toy Story—the world’s first fully computer-animated film—opened to critical acclaim and $29 million in box-office receipts. One week later, Pixar, the studio that created the movie and that many had written off just months before, went public. It was the biggest IPO of the year and meant a billion-dollar windfall for Jobs. More than that, it gave Jobs back his mojo...
In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found...
Matthew Herbert has devoted a large chunk of his life to listening. Since the '90s, the UK-based electronic musician has been collecting and recording everyday sounds and making them into music. The result is an eclectic list of albums: One is made of sounds from kitchen objects; another from the human body; yet another samples food sounds, from noises inside an industrial poultry factory to thousands of people taking a bite of an apple at the same time.
But his latest effort, One Pig, is different: Over the course of a year, Herbert recorded the life of a pig, from the time it was born till its last hours in a truck on its way to the slaughterhouse...
Photograph from Occupy Wall Street demonstrations around the country...
