Many Jewish settlers in the West Bank believe the land was promised to them in the Bible by God. By that rationale, the thoughts of the U.S. president or even their own leaders means little. But there is concern among settlers that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may buckle under pressure from President Obama's new U.S. administration and freeze the expansion of any settlements in the West Bank or what they refer to by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria. So ...

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting ...

Summer is here, and that means so are summer jobs. While lots of young people find work as lifeguards or camp counselors, just as many are forced off the beaten path to find their first paychecks. Don't worry if you get stuck with an odd job that might not totally dovetail with your life goals, though. Lots of wildly successful celebrities have had some strange jobs before hitting it big. Here are just a few quirky vocations held ...

From the beginning, when cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger first arrived in our present — nude, greasy and heralded by what now seems like a very quaint series of lightning strikes — it was a bad idea to dwell on the time-traveling twist that has him pursuing a target, John Connor, who is still unconceived yet also alive in the future. Better to focus on key information from The Terminator, like the fact that a seemingly simple statement of intent—"I'll be ...

Now that the bank stress tests are completed, is it time to plan another round? The government's bank exams, the results of which were released last Thursday, seem to have calmed the market and paved the way for the nation's largest financial firms to raise tens of billion of dollars. As a result, a number of academics and policy watchers are warming to the idea of making the stress tests permanent. They like the fact that the stress tests ...

Ten years ago, Facebook didn't exist. Ten years before that, we didn't have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won't look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with ...

Ferrari rocked the world of motor racing on Tuesday when the Italian Formula 1 giants announced they will not be entering a team for the 2010 world championships. The decision is the result of a dispute with the sport's governing body, the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), over proposed regulations to enforcing cost caps upon teams on the Grand Prix circuit. "Ferrari confirms its opposition to the new technical regulations adopted by the FIA and does not intend entering ...

Before Susan Boyle came along and gave nearly everyone in the world goosebumps, there was Paul Potts. The winner of the TV program "Britain's Got Talent" in 2007, Potts recalls the butterflies he felt in the lead-up to his audition. "I'm not really sure what made me walk on the stage in the end," he says. "It did feel like I was walking under my own motion. Especially going out in front of Simon Cowell. I've always respected him for ...

The automobile business is great. Just ask someone who's in it. "People want to buy cars," says Rod Buscher, CEO of Summit Automotive Partners in Denver, which owns 30 assorted dealerships nationwide. And he really wants to sell cars. The problem is that would-be buyers lack either the income or the access to credit that would allow them to drive a new Malibu or Lincoln or Camry off the lot. That won't last forever; in fact, the automobile business figures ...

To figure out whether you'll like the restaurant around the corner or that new guy in accounting or a vacation in Madrid, or just about anything else you've never personally experienced, try asking a stranger who has. That person is more likely to predict — more accurately than you — your future reaction, according to a new study published in the March 20 issue of Science. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, the best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness, argues that people ...