Glodman Sachs Testifies in the Insider Trading Trial of Raj Rajaratnam

Chief executive of Goldman Sachs was pulled into a foreign affairs trial of Raj Rajaratnam and an accusation of Insider Trading.

The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd C. Blankfein, testified on Wednesday in the insider-trading trial of Raj Rajaratnam, who before his arrest in 2009 was among the most powerful hedge fund managers on Wall Street. It was a unusual role for the Goldman chief executive, who has had audiences with presidents, foreign leaders and chieftains of the world’s largest companies. But on Wednesday, he was addressing a jury of New Yorkers — including teachers, transit workers and the unemployed — all of whom said they had never heard of Mr. Blankfein during the jury selection process. Federal prosecutors subpoenaed Mr. Blankfein to testify in the case against Mr. Rajaratnam, the co-founder of the Galleon Group who is facing up to 25 years in prison on charges that he earned $45 million trading on illegal stock tips. Among those the government says conspired with Mr. Rajaratnam was Rajat K. Gupta, a former Goldman director who has been accused of giving Mr. Rajaratnam highly sensitive information about the bank’s board meetings during the financial crisis.

Debate Leads to Fall in Portugal"s Premier

The Austerity Debate causes Portugal to become the third country to be forced to accept public funds.

Another European government fell victim to the politics of austerity on Wednesday when the prime minister of Portugal resigned after opposition parties rejected his last-ditch attempt to push through a package of spending cuts and tax increases. The failure of Prime Minister José Sócrates to complete a fourth round of painful financial measures within a year led to the government’s collapse and pushed the nation closer to a bailout from Europe and the International Monetary Fund. Because its financing in the bond markets has become so costly, Portugal is expected to become the third country in the euro zone to be forced to accept public funds, following Greece and Ireland. It is a blunt reminder that last year’s debt crisis has not gone away. Ireland’s government also collapsed after its tough austerity measures failed to persuade investors to provide it financing at affordable rates.

Homelessness Numbers raise Exponentially

A survey of a dozen of the largest cities in the Nation all show up with the same thing... A raise in homelessness levels.

More families with children are becoming homeless as they face mounting economic pressures, including mortgage foreclosures, according to a USA TODAY survey of a dozen of the largest cities in the nation. Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington. "Everywhere I go, I hear there is an increase" in the need for housing aid, especially for families, says Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates federal programs. He says the main causes are job losses and foreclosures.

College Education Leads to Job Leads to Renting a Home leads to Homelessness?

A man gets a top notch education from Syracuse University got a home that he was renting, the recession hits, now he's being foreclosed out of his home and being forced to live week to week in a motel.

Costa Mesa (California): Greg Hayworth, 44, graduated from Syracuse University and made a good living in his home state, California, from real estate and mortgage finance. Then that business crashed, and early last year the bank foreclosed on the house his family was renting, forcing their eviction. Now the Hayworths and their three children represent a new face of homelessness in Orange County: formerly middle income, living week to week in a cramped motel room. As the recession has deepened, longtime workers who lost their jobs are facing the terror and stigma of homelessness for the first time, including those who have owned or rented for years. Some show up in shelters and on the streets, but others, like the Hayworths, are the hidden homeless—living doubled up in apartments, in garages or in motels, uncounted in federal homeless data and often receiving little public aid.

Removal of Homeless from Tourist Areas

On Honolulu the homeless are our friends, they are just like tourists that stay here forever. Until you see them living in their little lean-tos or tents in the general view of the tourists, then they are a hazard to business and tourism and they must be removed. Effective Immediately!

From his home on Ilalo Street, Banery Afituk can feel the breeze off Mamala Bay, two blocks away. Walking out his front door, to his right, he can make out the tops of the luxury ocean liners, and to his left, some of this city’s finer high rises. “I like it here,” he said, as his three children played around him. But all these tents, including Mr. Afituk’s, are about to disappear. Hawaii redevelopment officials told residents of this fetid colony that by Tuesday they would remove the estimated 75 remaining tents, lean-tos and other structures, forcing about 100 people who have called the area home to find somewhere else. State officials said they were simply trying to enforce the law and clean up the waterfront district to encourage development in a desirable corner of the island where the tents, piles of garbage and wandering homeless offer quite a contrast to the rest of Oahu.

Hong Kong has Hyperfast Broadband Speed

Residents of Hong Kong are happy with their ultrafast broadband speed that is also ultracheap (unlike ours).

HONG KONG residents can enjoy astoundingly fast broadband at an astoundingly low price. It became available last year, when a scrappy company called Hong Kong Broadband Network introduced a new option for its fiber-to-the-home service: a speed of 1,000 megabits a second — known as a “gig” — for less than $26 a month. In the United States, we don’t have anything close to that. But we could. And we should. Verizon, the nation’s leading provider of fiber-to-the-home service, doesn’t offer a gig, or even half that speed. Instead, it markets a “fastest” service that is only 50 megabits a second for downloading and 20 megabits a second for uploading. It costs $144.99 a month. That’s one-twentieth the speed of Hong Kong Broadband’s service for downloading, for more than five times the price.

Oil Business Changes

Robert Dudley says that they are taking all necessary precautions to prevent another deep water oil-spill (similar to the one we suffered last year).

“I think it would be a mistake to dismiss our experience of the last year simply as a ‘black swan,’ a one-in-a-million occurrence that carries no wider application for our industry as a whole,” Mr. Dudley told oil executives at a conference here. “I believe the industry also has a responsibility to change.” Mr. Dudley has sold billions of dollars in assets to pay for damages from the Gulf accident. He has put up for sale half of BP’s refining assets in the United States, including the giant Texas City refinery where 15 workers were killed in a 2005 explosion, in an effort to raise $5 billion. But he has also tried to guide the company on a renewed growth path. Mr. Dudley has lined up more than 30 projects around the world, including in Russia, India and Canada.

Shantytowns Reappear

The Shantytowns (Originating in the era of Hoover and The Great Depression) have made their return under the rail roads of California.

“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

Mental Health Break

EA's Bulletstorm and Sony's Killzone3 take Bungie's Halo version of the first person shooter game to the next level.

That’s where Killzone 3 and Bulletstorm come in. Released in head-to-head competition last week, each offers a well-polished addition to today’s first-person shooter game. It is a world defined by amusing, if routinely predictable and ultimately superfluous stories and characters. It is a world of eye-watering animation and digital effects. It is a world in which subtlety is reviled. The Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake franchises, all by id Software, originated the shooter in the 1990s on PCs. A decade ago Bungie’s Halo was an essential ingredient in the emergence of Microsoft’s Xbox, and it demonstrated that shooters really could work on consoles. The current champion is Activision’s Call of Duty series.Neither Killzone 3, published by Sony for the PlayStation 3, nor Bulletstorm, published by Electronic Arts for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, tries to outdo Call of Duty in its own niche, the evocation of modern warfare. (Electronic Arts tried and failed at that last year with its mediocre reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise and will try again later this year with a new game in the Battlefield series.)

Twitter Helping the Homeless

A new website called Underheard in New York started a system that give the homeless of New York a prepaid cell phone that allows them to create and update their own Twitter feed in a hope that getting them as many followers as possible makes their ideas and their pain known to the rest of the world.

“We had the idea to use social media to help out the homeless,” said one of the interns, Rosemary Melchior. “One goal was to increase the interaction between homeless people and the community around them.” The agency gave her and her two partners, Robert Weeks and Willy Wang, $1,000 and this directive: “Do something good, famously.” They created a Web site called Underheard in New York, whose goal is to “help homeless New Yorkers speak for themselves through Twitter.”