A source close to the deal told The Wall Street Journal that the agreement was approved in a meeting by telephone on Friday. He said the deal could be announced as early as Monday. Tumblr climbed to success shortly after launching in 2007 by making it easy for people to post blogs and photos, follow other people on Tumblr, and receive updates. It is continuing to grow at a rapid pace – the site had reached about 117 million unique users worldwide in March, up from around 58 million a year earlier, according to comScore. Upon acquiring Tumblr, Yahoo would gain a social media site which hosts communication and blogging for millions of people. However, the site generates little profit. Tumblr, which began placing ads on its site just last year, generated $13 million in revenue last year, Tumblr Chief Executive David Karp said in a recent statement. Yahoo believes it could help the blogging site bring in more money by selling ads and boosting its own revenue in the process, sources said. Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who joined the company last summer, became interested in Tumblr a couple of months ago, a source said. Acquisitions were expected to be part of Mayer’s strategy although she has only acquired small companies in the past. In the fall of 2011, Tumblr’s $85 million venture-capital investment valued the company at $800 million. Yahoo is also expected to deliver an update about its Flickr photo-sharing site on Monday, according to a source. … Read More
Gerald Celente ~ Trends In The News: Leading Into Disaster
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Gerald Celente – Jeff Rense Show – May 14, 2013
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No peace pipe: Native American tribes on warpath over Keystone XL pipeline
Native Americans are opposed to the 1,179-mile (1,897km) Keystone XL project, a system to transport tar sands oil from Canada and the northern United States to refineries in Texas for various reasons, including possible damage to sacred sites, pollution, and water contamination.Although the planned pipeline would not pass directly through any Native American reservation, tribes in proximity to the proposed system say it will violate their traditional lands and that the environmental risks of the project are simply too great.Russ Girling, CEO of TransCanada, the company that hopes to build the pipeline, has promised in the past that Keystone XL will be “the safest pipeline ever built.”The Indian groups, as well as other activist organizations, doubt the claim, saying the risks involved in the project are too high.In an effort to ease their concerns, officials from the Department of State agreed to meet with tribal leaders on Thursday in the Hilton Garden Inn in Rapid City, Michigan.Before the talks could begin, however, tribal leaders walked out, angered that the government had sent what they considered low-level representatives.In a press conference following the walkout, tribal leaders took turns criticizing the project, as well as the Obama administration.”I will only meet with President Obama,” Bryan Brewer, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, told the Rapid City Journal.Others mentioned environmental concerns with the proposed pipeline, which echo the concern of environmental groups across the country.Casey Camp-Horinek, an elder with the Southern Ponca Tribe based in Oklahoma, compared the pipeline and other environmental damage to the historical events that had decimated her people during European colonization.”We find ourselves victims of another form of genocide, and it’s environmental genocide, and it’s caused by the extractive industries,” she said.Charles LoneChief, vice president of the Pawnee Business Council, headquartered in Oklahoma, said the public was misinformed about the pipeline’s environmental risks.Unlike a traditional crude oil pipeline, Keystone XL will pump oil that is collected from tar sands. To turn this substance into a transportable liquid, oil companies must add chemicals that environmental groups warn are highly toxic.”That gets into our waterways, our water tables, our aquifers, then we have problems,” LoneChief said.The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated that the Keystone XL pipeline will increase annual US carbon pollution emissions by up to 27.6 million metric tons – the impact of adding nearly 6 million cars on the road, according to the Environment News Service.Robin LeBeau, a council representative for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe based in South Dakota, pledged to protest against any construction, even if that meant standing in front of bulldozers.”What the State Department, what President Obama needs to hear from us, is that we are going to be taking direct action,” she said.I believe this is going to be one of the biggest battles we are ever going to have, LeBeau added.This is not the first time that Native American groups have spoken out on the project.Leaders from ten Canadian and US indigenous groups gathered in Ottawa, Ontario in March to protest the construction of pipelines.“Tar sands pipelines will not pass through [our] collective territories under any conditions or circumstances,” the tribes said at a press conference. … Read More
Winning-bid kid: Teen pledges $15mn for Coca-Cola secret formula
Georgia antiques dealer Cliff Kluge claims that he has obtained a document of one of corporate America’s secrets that has been guarded for 125 years. He says he discovered the formula among of stack of papers he recently purchased at the estate sale of a prominent Chattanooga chemist.The opening bid for the yellowing typewritten document of $5 million rose to a buy-it-now $15 million as the famed formula was sold to a teenager.”It would have been a wonderful thing if it had found a genuine buyer”, Kluge said, as quoted by AFP, “but some 15-year-old kid bid on it – and it’s not a legitimate bid”According to eBay rules, the buyer has a three-day period during which he has to pay for the item. Kluge said he will relist the ‘historic document’ if the kid doesn’t find the money.However Coca-Cola claims that its secret concocted over a century ago by Dr. John S. Pemberton is kept in a vault at its World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta.”We sleep well at night knowing the secret formula is safe and secure with us,” Coca-Cola spokesman Petro Kacur said.Coca-Cola denies the recipe is an original, but admits it may come close to it.“It’s for a cola. But not Coca-Cola,” said the company’s archivist, Ted Ryan, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.The antiques dealer acknowledges on eBay that “there is no doubt (at least in my mind) that whoever typed the letter had seen the original recipe for Coca Cola … more evidence and external factors are falling in place to bolster the fact that this could be the original, with an emphasis on the word ‘could’.”In 2011, the public radio show ‘This American Life’ claimed it had discovered a supposed handwritten original recipe for Coca-Cola within a photograph accompanying an article published 34 years ago. In its earliest form the beverage was believed to have had cocaine among its ingredients. The beverage company insisted that the recipe was not original.As it stands, no one can authenticate any alleged copy of the secret formula unless Coca-Cola shows the original recipe – and that will probably never happen. … Read More
Snail speed: France’s economy slips into recession
Official figures show France has returned to its second recession in four years, as the economy shrank by 0.2% in Q1 of 2013, after shrinking the same amount in the final of quarter of last year, which has brought the Guardian newspaper to declare a ‘triple-dip recession’ in the eurozone’s second largest economy.The preliminary data from the INSEE statistics agency shows that overall investment contracted 0.9 percent in the first quarter.Business investment was down 0.8 percent, and exports contracted for a second consecutive quarter, shrinking 0.5 percent. Household consumption fell by 0.1 percent, the first time since Q2 of last year, despite high spending on energy over the winter season.The data is more bad news for President Hollande and the Socialist government, who were elected on the promise to end austerity, and one year later, have failed.30,000 leftists demonstrated against Hollande and the Socialist government, who have not delivered on their promise of 0.1 percent growth. The protesters’ message was clear- austerity isn’t working for France.“We are here to tell him, Mr. President, time is up and you need to start changing things,” one protester, teacher Thibault Sans, told RT.First on the agenda of change is unemployment, which in France is expected to hit at least 12.2% this year, up almost 1% from 11.4% in 2012.French employment is also well below the Eurozone average, but much lower than crisis headliners Spain and Greece, where unemployment is expected to peak at 27%.Waning citizen support A survey of 1,027 French people between April 26 and April 28 showed that only 11% think Mr. Hollande will succeed in his objective of getting unemployment to start falling by the end of the year, according to the Wall Street Journal.Earlier this month, the European Commission warned that France would enter recession this year and said the eurozone’s economy would shrink by 0.4%. The commission also forecast a rise in the deficit of 3.9% of GDP, much higher than the acceptable EU deficit target of 3%The most explicit of warning signs may have come two weeks ago when the European Central Bank cut its key interest rate from 0.75% to 0.5%, a clear indication of a deepening crisis, with no improvement on the horizon.According to a Reuters poll of economists, there will be no strong recovery until at least 2015.A near miss for Germany, but not the Netherlands The eurozone’s strongest economy, Germany, also showed some sluggish signs of growth. GDP grew by just 0.1% in the first quarter, far less than 0.3% expected by economists, showing sluggish signs of growth.The German office of statistics had previously reported a 0.6 percent contraction, but later revised that figure to the standing 0.7 percent.”The German economy is only slowly picking up steam,” the Statistics Office said in a statement. “The extreme winter weather played a role in this weak growth.”Commerzbank today lowered its German 2013 growth forecast to 0.2 percent from 0.5 percent, Bloomberg reported.Growth may have been delayed in German due to a long winter, some experts think. The particularly cold winter delayed construction and business confidence.Merkel’s initiative to bring the Eurozone afloat seems to only be producing results in Germany, as the rest of Europe is drowning in stagnated economies and bad credit.“The euro area is a drag on the economy and certainly a handicap for German companies,” Andreas Scheuele, an economist at Dekabank in Frankfurt, told Bloomberg.The Netherlands, which entered recession three months ago, also showed contraction, with GDP falling by 0.1% in the first quarter of this year. Once one of the strongest-looking members of the eurozone, the Netherlands suffers from rising unemployment and the housing market bubble having burst.Paris-Berlin rapportThe new French recession could further complicate the strained relationship between France and Germany, pro-growth and pro-austerity, respectively.On May 6th, Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said French austerity measures are at an end, instead opting for growth.“We’ve been pleading for a growth policy for a year. Austerity on its own impedes growth.”President Hollande and France have been tiptoeing around Germany’s call for austerity, stirring a ‘friendly tension’ instead of direct opposition to Chancellor Merkel’s agenda. Hollande has not continued the legacy of ‘Merkozy’, a warm and public alliance between the German Chancellor and his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.France is in a difficult position: either continue its power alliance with Germany and unpopular support for austerity, or break with Germany and instead align itself with Europe’s troubled ‘south’ – Italy and Spain.Wednesday’s sobering results technically align France in camp ‘B’, but it will remains to be seen if the French Finance Ministry continues to tag-along with Merkel and friends. … Read More
US hospitals grapple with growing number of drug dependent newborns
Known medically as “neonatal abstinence syndrome,” babies born with a drug dependency will require small does of an opiate, such as morphine, until they can be weaned off and their withdrawal symptoms are brought under control. According to an Associated Press report, staff at the East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville expect to treat 320 children this year for drug dependence, up from 283 the year prior and 33 in 2008. Though the US does not officially track the number of infants born with a drug dependency, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association cites over 13,000 infants were born with the affliction across the country in 2009. Withdrawal symptoms for adult drug addicts appear to be similar to those experienced by infants. Babies born with a dependency can suffer from nausea, vomiting, severe stomach cramps and diarrhea. The newborns may also experience issues eating and sleeping, and can even suffer from seizures. Shockingly, the AP reports that at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital about half of its neonatal unit’s 49 newborns are being treated for drug addiction. The agitation caused by withdrawal have led medical staff to place mittens on the infants’ hands to prevent them from scratching and rubbing their own faces. A similar report by the Wall Street Journal in 2012, which focused on Florida hospitals, describes medical professionals slowly coming to grips with an increase in drug dependent newborns.“The problem that we started having with babies withdrawing from drugs that moms are taking during pregnancy happened very gradually. We’d see a baby a week, then two, then three, then four – to the point that we found 10 per cent of the babies that we had at the hospital were there because they were withdrawing from mom’s drug use,” said Terri Ashmeade, NICU Medical Director for Tampa General Hospital. The same WSJ report cites that between 2000 and 2009 the number of infants in the US demonstrating symptoms of withdrawal from opioids, including prescription painkillers, has tripled. At East Tennessee babies experiencing withdrawal are often placed in private, dark rooms with either rocking machines to try and keep them calm, or frequent visits by one of the hospital’s 57 “cuddlers” – volunteers that supplement regular staff by holding babies, and rocking them to try and ease their symptoms. It is impossible to be unmoved by these infants, said Carla Saunders, the hospital’s neonatal nurse practitioner who spoke with the AP.”If there is anything that could drive the people in our society to stop turning their heads to adult addiction, it’s going to be the babies,” says Saunders. Drug abuse in the state of Tennessee is often ranked among the highest in the US, though as additional reporting already confirms the number of newborns with prescription drug dependencies is hardly confined to that state. At Florida’s Tampa General Hospital, Ashmeade tells the WSJ video reporters of the impact that these babies have made on her staff.“The nurses have a hard time. These babies require a lot of care, and sometimes, despite our best efforts, there is still a period of time before we can get them comfortable,” says Ashmeade. … Read More
