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On the nation's report card, California schools have advanced from failing to -- failing a teensy bit less. Despite posting minute gains this year, California students scored at nearly the bottom of the nation in reading and math, test results show. In reading, California performed worse than all other states and only outscored Washington, D.C. In math, state fourth-graders ranked above only D.C. and Mississippi; eighth-graders did a notch better, also outscoring Alabama. The National Assessment of Education Progress is administered every other year to a sampling of students across the country. It is the only nationally standardized test for...

Pres. Barack Obama promised to have a plan to pay for his massive new stimulus bill by Monday. He broke that promise, as he has broken so many others, and remains in the “plan to have a plan” stage of his inscrutable meditations, having only made yet another unsubstantial speech, full of high sentiment and short on details. The president says he wants to ensure that the very wealthy do not pay lower effective tax rates than do the middle-class, and argues that families and businesses earning more than $250,000 in any given year should pay an additional $1,500,000,000,000.00 or...

PARIS -- The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Wednesday that developed economies will shrink less sharply this year than it previously expected, and will grow next year. The projection was the first upward revision to the OECD's growth forecasts since June 2007, before the financial crisis began. The International Monetary Fund is likely to follow suit when it releases new forecasts July 7. However, the OECD warned governments and central banks against prematurely withdrawing stimulus packages, which it deemed essential in averting a deeper, more prolonged recession. The OECD, a leading think tank and policy forum for its...

The Recession is over. This means that when the National Bureau of Economic Research gets around to dating this recession, I predict they will pick June 2009 as the bottom. I know it doesn't feel that way now. After all, if July is just a bit better than June, it will still be terrible and the year-over-year comparisons will be awful. That's how it always is at the bottom of a recession. Furthermore, there is lots of bad data coming. How can I say the recession is over when it is obvious that unemployment is going to continue to climb...

Greenspan sees "seeds of bottoming" for U.S. housing Tue May 12, 3:34 pm ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday that "the seeds of a bottoming" in plunging U.S. home markets were becoming visible. Speaking to a National Association of Realtors summit, Greenspan said there were reasons to believe that bulging inventories of unsold homes were dwindling and that should bring some stability to prices.

How Low Can The Market Go? Henry Blodget | Mar. 2, 2009 /snip There were four massive stock bubbles in the 20th Century: 1901, 1929, 1966, and 2000. During each of these bubble peaks, the S&P 500 neared or exceeded 25X on professor Robert Shiller's cyclically adjusted P/E ratio.* After the first three of these peaks, the S&P 500 PE did not bottom until it hit 5X-8X. We're still in the middle of the last one. The most recent bubble peak, 2000, was by far the most extreme we have ever experienced. In 2000, the S&P 500 by prof. Shiller's...

Do you think you've hit bottom? Oh, no. There's a bottom below. - Malvina Reynolds To begin with after the end of a house price bubble homeowners feel that they have some sort of entitlement to the previous high value of their homes. If they can't get it, they often won't accept lower offers. So, previously established highs tend to be "sticky". This is exemplified by the trend of sales shown in Berkeley, CA, multiple listing data between the late 1960's and early 1980's. Sales volume went down. Inventory went up. Prices didn't drop. There is also normally a "resistance...

Intermission BY TIM W. WOOD Major stock averages have retested their 2002 lows, oil hits the 40 dollar mark and the dollar weakens. Does this now mean that it’s over? Has the bear market run its course? Is a new bull market on the horizon? Will oil go back to 140? Will the new administration fix everything? Will 2009 bring in more of the glory days? /snip Anyway, I don’t think the bear market is over or that a new bull market has begun and I can virtually assure you that the new administration cannot “fix” the mess we are...

The clergyman, in his 50s, told nurses he had been hanging curtains when he fell backwards on to his kitchen table. He happened to be nude at the time of the mishap, said the vicar, who insisted he had not been playing a sex game. The vicar had to undergo a delicate operation to extract the vegetable, one of a range of odd items medics in Sheffield have had to remove from people's backsides or genitals. Others include a can of deodorant, a cucumber, a Russian doll – and a carnation.

Link only since goes to NYT subscription page. Katie, are you figuring it out yet? Oh, didn't think so. Keep up your failing tactics.

IF YOU WANT TO know how smart I am, read my columns. If you want to know how stupid I am, read the comments section of my columns, where readers get to rip what I say to shreds. Used to be that when supposed "experts" like me talked, all people could do was listen. Now they can talk back, and their ideas can compete with mine head-to-head on the web. The most frequent criticism I get in the comments section is that, in my generally bullish view on the economy and the stock market, I'm overlooking the lethal effect of...

Edwards bikes with Lance Armstrong: 'The biggest problem is my butt hurts'... Then the link. http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070725/NEWS/70725054/1001

The safety of Tasers, the electric pistols that are widely used by police, is under new scrutiny after a study by a Wisconsin scientist showed that shocks from the guns cause the hearts of healthy pigs to stop beating. The finding contradicts previous studies that showed that Taser shocks did not cause heart disturbances in pigs, whose hearts are similar to those in humans. John G. Webster, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin who conducted the new study, said the earlier studies contained serious errors because they did not account for the fact that pigs have...

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported. According to online magazine www.zsaru.hu, workers in Szeged in the south of Hungary tried to move the barrel after they had drained it, only to find it was surprisingly heavy and were shocked when the body of a naked man fell out. The website said that the body of the man had been shipped back from Jamaica 20 years...

.Lo and Beyonce can take another bow. The booty-shaking stars have shaped the newest generation of mannequins, with hundreds of well-rounded plastic backsides appearing in shop windows across New York. Bootylicious figures clad in tight low-rise jeans have spilled from the city's street fashion stores into more established labels. "It's absolutely the trend," said Dwight Critchfield, creative director for mannequin firm Goldsmith. "These mannequins look great, and there is a real sex appeal about them." The recent pop culture fixation on large bottoms has been around since at least 1992, when rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot scored a hit with "Baby Got...

Traces of an ancient settlement found on the dry bottom of the Aral Kyzylorda. November 5. KAZINFORM. The scientists of the Institute of Archeology named after Alkey Margulan found some traces of an ancient town on the dry bottom of the Aral Sea. The area of the town amounts to about 6 ha and goes back to the 13-14 centuries, i.e. the epoch of the Golden Horde. As a result of archeological researches there have also been found the relics of different workshops, windmills and storehouses for ceramic articles and the burial ground where the noble representatives of that...

Nelson's great love found at the bottom of the ocean ADMIRAL Horatio Nelson’s favourite ship, on which he is said to have seduced Lady Hamilton and lost an eye in battle, has been found off the coast of Uruguay. International treasure-divers said yesterday that they had found HMS Agamemnon, a 64-gun vessel which was the pride of Britain’s naval fleet when it went down in 1809. Plans are now being made to lift the ship from its watery grave following the multi-million-pound deep-sea exploration. Uruguayan millionaire Hector Bado, the operation’s backer, hailed the find as "akin to finding the Holy...

<p>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Federal regulators have decided to close a large swath of Pacific Coast waters to bottom fishing for the rest of the year due to concerns about overfishing, California state officials said.</p> <p>The Pacific Fishery Management Council, which sets limits on West Coast fishing, voted Wednesday to restrict catches of bottom-dwelling fish off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington.</p>

SEATTLE - Some of the nation's largest companies, struggling to provide expensive health insurance to employees, are targeting obesity as a way to reduce their bottom lines. According to an estimate by the Washington, D.C.-based Washington Business Group on Health, a lobbying firm, obesity costs companies more than $12 billion per year. This cost is due to higher health insurance costs, paid sick leave, life insurance and disability insurance. “Obesity has a devastating impact on the health of employees and, by extension, on their employers,” explained Vince Kerr, a physician and Director of Health Care Management at Ford Motor Company,...

UFO investigators Olivia Newton and Jim Clifford are trying to solve the case of the red dots at Booger Bottom. Prank calls, publicity seekers and strange natural phenomena are nothing new. But the tale of three people driving on a rural stretch of highway called Booger Bottom, near Greenville, Georgia, got their attention. Newton and Clifford work for the Mutual UFO Network of Georgia. They listen to the stories no one else will hear, and try to find an explanation. A 50-year-old Tucker man, his brother and his 73-year-old sister-in-law from Warm Springs reported seeing round red objects the size...

Saturday moaning: A good mystery deserves a good location. How about Booger Bottom, Ga.? That's where a possible Unidentified Flying Object was sighted early last month. I say ''possible'' because it's difficult to prove things one way or another. Here's the story. You can make up your own mind. UFO investigators are looking into this so-called Mystery at Booger Bottom. The incident involved a 50-year-old man, his brother and his 73-year-old sister-in-law. They were driving through Booger Bottom in a sport utility vehicle and were on their way home to Warm Springs, Ga. According to the occupants, a red swirling...