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Facebook users in America and France reported seeing their private messages posted publicly Monday as part of the Timeline feature, making them visible to anyone.

According to Slate, the issue was first reported in France, where the newspaper Le Monde called it “A Dark Day For Facebook.”

Messages that were once private communications began showing up in users’ 2011 and earlier timelines, which are posted as wall messages “posted by friends.” Users can take them out of public view by clicking on the Edit option and selecting “Hide from Timeline.”

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Views: 273 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/24

Mitt Romney dabbled in Russian stocks, buying and then selling shares in a Russian gas company in advance of election season.

Mitt Romney acquired and sold shares last year in the politically powerful Russian gas giant Gazprom. Ann and Mitt Romney's family trust return, released Friday, shows Romney sold his Gazprom stock at a loss last September in advance of election season.

Romney's 2011 trust — managed, he says, without his input — also shows in its return hundreds of dropped shares of a Russian internet firm, Yandex, sold at a loss in August of 2011. Yandex operates the largest search engine in the country.

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Views: 316 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/24

I read two papers over the weekend both of which underscored an important point about an ongoing area of contention around the fiscal cliff: allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the top 2% will not have a negative impact on the economy.

The first one is by economist Owen Zidar, a careful econometric study of the impact throughout history of tax changes on jobs and growth. What’s unique and particularly relevant about this study is that it breaks up the tax cuts into the parts that go to the bottom 90% of taxpayers and those that go to the top 10%.

And in numerous different statistical tests and models, Zidar consistently finds no significant impacts of tax cuts to the high income group. As he puts it in the conclusion (my bold):

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Views: 274 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/24

The Irish data protection commissioner (DPC) issued his assessment (pdf) on Friday of Facebook’s compliance with recommendations the regulator made last December. The DPC, who was forced into the issue following complaints by a group of Austrian law students calling themselves “Europe v Facebook,” had told Facebook it had to be more upfront about giving users privacy choices.

The review suggested that Facebook had “fully implemented” most of the DPC’s recommendations, and those that had not been implemented would be taken care of “with a clear timescale” in place.

And one of those moves is apparently to stop recording people’s facial characteristics to suggest photo tags automatically.

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Views: 247 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/24

A judge has ruled that certain information involved in a lawsuit against Bain Capital, the private equity firm where Mitt Romney made his fortune, should be released to the public.

U.S. District Judge Edward Harrington said in a decision on Friday that the public has the right to see a new complaint filed as part of a class-action antitrust lawsuit that claims Bain Capital and 10 other private equity firms colluded with one another to keep the costs of leveraged buyouts low. The plaintiffs recently filed another complaint with new information, but that complaint has not yet been made public because of opposition from Bain Capital lawyers, who say doing so could hurt the company's business because of increased scrutiny during the election news cycle.

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Views: 385 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/23

January this year the U.S. Government destroyed Megaupload, but founder Kim Dotcom is a not done with the file-hosting business yet and is preparing to come back with a vengeance. The coding work for the new Megaupload is nearly finished, the servers have been ordered, and investors are lining up. A return of the file-hosting site appears to be looming.

With 50 million visitors per day at its peak, Megaupload was one of the largest websites on the Internet.

This quickly changed January this year when the U.S. Government took down the file-hosting service and had several key employees arrested including founder Kim Dotcom.

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Views: 301 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/23

(Reuters) - Euro zone states are preparing to allow the bloc's permanent bailout fund to leverage its capital in the same way as its predecessor so it can reach a capacity of more than 2 trillion euros and rescue big countries if necessary, Der Spiegel said on Sunday.

The weekly news magazine said that the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) would have two instruments like its predecessor, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), that would only allow public money to be used for particularly risky transactions such as buying Spanish bonds, while private investors would provide the rest.

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Views: 254 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/23

Reports early Monday from China suggest that a mass disturbance or riots may have broken out at a Foxconn factory in the Chinese city of Taiyuan.

It is still unclear what exactly happened, but posts on China’s popular twitter-like service, Weibo, from users in the area show photographs and video of large numbers of police in and around the factory – many in riot gear – blocking off throngs of people.

Other photos show debris strewn around the Foxconn compound and in one case, an overturned guard tower.

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Views: 263 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/23

Tagg Romney became the father of twins via a surrogate mother. The contract he used included terms that would allow him or the surrogate the right to abort even in non-life threatening situations. TMZ is reporting that Mitt Romney covered the expense of the contract.

"If in the opinion of the treating physician or her independent obstetrician there is potential physical harm to the surrogate, the decision to abort or not abort is to be made by the surrogate."

"In the event the child is determined to be physiologically, genetically or chromosomally abnormal, the decision to abort or not to abort is to be made by the intended parents. In such a case the surrogate agrees to abort, or not to abort, in accordance with the intended parents' decision."

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Views: 408 | Added by: Teesus | Date: 2012/09/23



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