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A new study published in the journal Soil Use and Management attempts for the first time to measure the extent and severity of land degradation across the globe and concludes that 24 percent of theland area is degrading — often in very productive areas.

The capital’s tent city sprawls messily on a grassed-over landfill beneath power lines, home to some 200 men and women with nowhere else to go. It has been here for more than a year, but in the last three weeks it has transformed into a vivid symbol of a financial crisis otherwise invisible to most [...]

A summer airfare war is heating up as one of the worst downturns in travel is leaving airlines scrambling to fill seats.

Fares for summer trips are often among the highest of the year and start rising in the spring, but not this year. With business travel plummeting, airlines are pulling back and offering some of [...]

A Bothell startup is looking to keep people healthy by zapping germs off computer keyboards, starting with local hospitals.

If you ever send email you might regret later Gmail  now offers “undo send” where you can stop the email before it is ever read.

International live streaming television news aggregator. posted by netbros at 3:44 PM

At two of the forthcoming conferences – the Game Developers Conference and GamesBeat 09 conference – the San Diego, California-based startup Zeebo intends introducing its console specifically aimed for those developing-world markets which the game console biggies hesitate venturing into!

The conferences will see John Rizzo, CEO of Zeebo – a company funded by Brazilian video [...]

It’s been a busy week for Y Combinator, the early-stage investment firm known for its entrepreneur boot camps. Not only did the firm hold its bi-annnual demo day, when startups pitch their companies to investors, but Y Combinator also announced its first fund with outside investors. In the future, the firm will invest money from [...]

Poverty compelled Henry Evangelista to drop out of high school and turn to scavenging and selling trash to help his family.

But who would have known that this 37-year-old junk man and his wife Maricel would eventually own a multimillion-peso furniture business?

His success is proof that he is an innate entrepreneur — a man who won’t [...]

A new generation of entrepreneurs is leaving behind storefronts to open up businesses on the Internet despite the tattered economy, learning from the boom and bust a decade ago.

The new wave of web-based businesses look for a niche to attract customers and the lower startup costs can help them get up and running more [...]

A lot of Twitter posts this afternoon about server problems.  I could not load the page on my Twitter account for several minutes at a time.  

Craigslist is a cool place to buy and sell stuff, it has a massive audience and you don’t have to pay the listing fees that Ebay charges. On the downside, though, Craigslist doesn’t have any method for conducting auctions, a proven way to get a good price for whatever you’re selling.

My friend Keith Teare solved [...]

Like Google Reader and FriendFeed, Streamy lets you follow news, blogs, Digg, and import RSS subscriptions from your Google Reader account and then share them with your friends. The interface is fairly innovative, allowing users to create widgets for searches, easily organizing different searches on various platforms. You can also drag and drop anything on [...]

Madison - At 9 a.m. in the state Capitol on a recent weekday, with the temperature outside in the single digits, about 20 people gathered in the building’s marble basement.

Some read papers, while [...]

The Federal Reserve sharply stepped up its efforts to bolster the economy on Wednesday, announcing that it would pump an extra $1 trillion into the financial system by purchasing Treasury bonds and mortgage securities.

Having already reduced the key interest rate it controls nearly to zero, the central bank has increasingly turned to alternatives like buying securities [...]

 A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.

Currency [...]

P2P money lending service Lending Club has closed a $12 million Series B round with Morgenthaler Ventures as the lead and joined by existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners. The total capital invested in the company is now $30 million. (It raised $12 million in angel and Series A funding in 2007, and [...]

The historic Greenbrier resort, which has gone from hosting presidents and royalty to posting losses, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Thursday and unveiled a deal to sell itself to hotel giant Marriott International Inc. for up to $130 million.

A sharp recessionary downturn for luxury hotels helped end nearly a century of ownership by [...]

Amy Adams is best known for her squeaky-clean persona in roles like the fairytale princess in “Enchanted,” her Oscar-nominated turn as a naive [...]

Search and social media guru John Battelle lashes out at analysts from Sanford Bernstein who claim in a New York Times article that monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” Their claim is that subscription fees are out of the question, ad revenues would likely be minimal, and that people who sign [...]

North Carolina startup food companies that have found their footing are getting help to take the next step toward growth.

The state Agriculture Department hosts a workshop in Greensboro on Thursday targeting at-home food product producers who have found a market for their products and want to move from part-timer to professional.

-Seattle Times

It’s the first time Google has made its vast trove of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device, and vaults the Sony Reader past Amazon.com’s (AMZN Quote – Cramer on AMZN – Stock Picks) Kindle as the device with the largest available library, at about 600,000 books.

The scanned books were all published before [...]

SEATTLE — It seems the future is now. Flying cars have long been talked about as a child of the future. But a company in Massachusetts just announced it will soon sell planes you can drive on the road. It will be, more or less, a flying car.

KOMO News obtained video of the first [...]

Time to clear out some inventory, boys! AT&T, starting March 26th, is going to start offering the 8GB and 16GB iPhone 3Gs at a no-commitment price. These prices are $599 and $699 respectively. The good news is that you do not need to perform an activation/unbrick at the point of purchase, so you can buy [...]

GoDaddy.com has signed on as a hosting partner in the Microsoft BizSpark program and will offer a range of services at special prices for Internet companies in their first three years of operation.

A spokesman for the family of Natasha Richardson said she has died.

Richardson, a gifted and precocious heiress to acting royalty whose career highlights included the film “Patty Hearst” and a Tony-winning performance in a stage revival of “Cabaret,” died after suffering an apparent head injury from a skiing accident.

Digg.com founder, Kevin Rose, is at it again with a Twitter directory called WeFollow. And although it’s capturing much of the limelight right now, it’s not the only service of its kind. In fact, there are quite a few sites that let you search for other users or see who the top users are on [...]

Creditors of the owner of retailer 1800mattress.com are seeking toforce the company into involuntary bankruptcy, according to court documents.

Three creditors of the company, known for its famous toll-free number, filed a Chapter 7 involuntary bankruptcy petition against Dial-A-Mattress Operating Corp in New York on Tuesday.

A spokesman for Dial-A-Mattress said the company has been exploring strategic [...]