Obama highlights need for more clean-energy funding

President Obama turned his attention to the need for more clean-energy funding Monday, arguing that an expanded investment is needed to lay the foundation for long-term economic growth, cut dependence on foreign oil and slow the process of global warming. Obama, speaking to a group of renewable-energy company owners and investors, said the country has “known the right choice for a generation (and that) the time has come to make that choice.” In the years ahead, the United States “can remain the world’s leading importer of foreign oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of renewable energy,” Obama argued. “We can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc, or we can create jobs preventing its worse effects

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How to Predict What You’ll Like? Ask a Stranger

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

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A Brief History of Chinese Internet Censorship

One of the sharpest challenges yet to China’s stifling attempts at Internet censorship comes in the form of a lowly alpaca. Actually, the alpaca-like creature starring in online videos and lining Chinese store toy shelves is a mythical “grass-mud horse” — whose name in Chinese sounds just like a vulgar expression involving a sex act and, well, your mother.

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Geithner: AIG must pay back bonus money

Insurance giant AIG will have to return to the Treasury Department the $165 million it just paid out in executive bonuses, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday in a letter to congressional leaders. “We will impose on AIG a contractual commitment to pay the treasury from the operations of the company the amount of the retention awards just paid,” Geithner wrote

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The State of the Media: Not Good

2009 State of the News Media The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism The Gist: The American financial and auto industries aren’t the only ones falling apart before the nation’s eyes. “Imagine someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke [and] suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness,” researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism write about the news media’s long-overdue embrace of the Internet in 2008, just as a global recession began wreaking havoc on the industry’s biggest advertisers

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Payout for women who got breast cancer after night shifts

Employers in Denmark have started paying compensation to women who have developed breast cancer after working night shifts. Thirty-eight eight women have so far received payments via their employers’ insurance companies, the Danish National Board of Industrial Injuries told CNN. To qualify for compensation, women must have developed breast cancer after having worked at least one night shift a week for 20 to 30 years.

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