After seven months as chief executive, Yahoo Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang has concluded hundreds of employees will have to be fired to help the slumping Internet icon recover from years of misguided management.

The Sunnyvale-based company's biggest purge since the dot-com bust most likely will be announced next week ...

Securities analysts are betting Yahoo will trim its 14,000-employee payroll by about 5 percent — or 700 workers. If that many people are dumped, Yahoo could save about $100 million ...

In a statement, Yahoo said it is embarking on a muliti-year transformation aimed at enriching long-term shareholders.

Yahoo poised to lay off hundreds - Yahoo! News

The ever-essential Verlyn Klinkenborg, following up on the thread about Magic Highway:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

To Drive or Not to Drive: That Was Never the Question

Woah

YouTube - Dolphin play bubble rings

Compiler Complaint - XKCD

Investigators picked through the gnarled wreckage Monday of two small planes that collided near an airport, killing five people — including one on the ground — and raining debris and bodies down on car dealership parking lots.

The two small Cessnas crashed at 3:35 p.m. Sunday about a mile from the small Corona Municipal Airport, authorities said.

Two people were killed from each plane, and a fifth was killed inside a Chevy dealership hit by wreckage, said Wayne Pollack of the National Transportation Safety Board.

"There were bodies falling out of the sky," eyewitness Hector Hernandez told KCBS-TV. "One of them crashed into the top of a Ford Mustang, and another one fell not too far behind that one on the parking lot."

The smashed fuselage of one of the planes landed atop a parked car. A wing from one of the planes sat in a parking lot. The debris was contained mostly within a 300-yard radius, said Pollack, although some pieces were found as far as 1,000 yards away.

Bodies fall out of sky as planes collide - Yahoo News

CHICAGO (Reuters) - New genetic evidence supports the theory that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to Europe from the New World, U.S. researchers said Monday, reviving a centuries-old debate about the origins of the disease.

They said a genetic analysis of the syphilis family tree reveals that its closest relative was a South American cousin that causes yaws, an infection caused by a sub-species of the same bacteria.

"Some people think it is a really ancient disease that our earliest human ancestors would have had. Other people think it came from the New World," said Kristin Harper, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

"What we found is that syphilis or a progenitor came from the New World to the Old World and this happened pretty recently in human history," said Harper ...

She said the study lends credence to the "Columbian theory," which links the first recorded European syphilis epidemic in 1495 to the return of Columbus and his crew.

"When you put together our genetic data with that epidemic in Naples in 1495, that is pretty strong support for the Columbian hypothesis," she said.

New study blames Columbus for syphilis spread - Yahoo News

BERLIN (Reuters) - A Berlin burglar's break-in took an unexpected turn when he stumbled upon a corpse and felt compelled to call the police.

"He called to say he'd just broken into a flat and found a dead body," said a spokeswoman for Berlin police Thursday. "He gave the address of the place and then hung up."

Officers discovered the 64-year-old resident of the flat dead in his bedroom. The man had passed away about two weeks ago, and authorities are not treating the death as suspicious.

Burglar finds corpse and calls police - Yahoo News

BEIJING (Reuters) - A 19-year-old Chinese student recorded the killing and dismembering of her married lover by her boyfriend, local media said on Friday.

The second-year student in the southwestern province of Yunnan, her boyfriend and another male accomplice had all been arrested after the killing last month, the Southern Metropolis Daily said.

The girl, who was from a struggling family in the capital Beijing and met the victim as a nightclub hostess, filmed as he was killed and his body was cut into "hundreds of pieces," the newspaper said.

"The dismembering was both out of hatred and aimed at making the body unrecognisable," the report said.

Guro comes to China.

Woman filmed killing of lover - Yahoo News

HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam has seized more than a ton of ratsnakes found aboard a Vietnam Airlines flight from Bangkok, the second time in about a month such snakes were found in air cargo to Vietnam, state media said on Friday.

The snakes -- scientific name Ptyas Mucosus and a protected species -- were found in more than 60 boxes that arrived in Hanoi's Noi Bai airport on Thursday, the Vietnam News Agency quoted officials as saying.

Last month, the airport authorities also seized 1,550 pounds of snakes aboard a Thai Airways flight to Hanoi

More snakes on a plane - Yahoo News

As frustrations mount over repeated delays in the Brian Nichols trial, the statewide public defender system will ask a judge Friday afternoon to remove a private attorney from Nichols' defense team.

The Nichols defense team has already billed almost $2 million in legal fees and expenses. The total is expected to rise once the lengthy trial begins for the man accused of killing four people as he escaped custody in the Fulton County Courthouse almost three years ago. Trial Judge Hilton Fuller has repeatedly delayed the Nichols trial because the defender council has said it has no more money to pay for Nichols' defense.

The lawyers can come up with quotes like this .....

"Lawyers aren't fungible."

.... while billing the county $85 to $125 an hour.

Attorney could be removed from Nichols defense - AJC.com