Democratic Rivals Hear Ohio's Ills, Set Out Plans for Mortgages, Jobs

Clinton Focuses on Housing, Obama on Nafta in a State Hit Hard in Recent Years
By AMY CHOZICK and NICK TIMIRAOSFebruary 25, 2008; Page A3

LORAIN, Ohio -- With a little more than a week before Ohio holds its primary contests, the two Democratic candidates are debating what has hurt the economically distressed state more: free-trade pacts or the housing crisis.
While Sen. Barack Obama focuses his economic talks on criticizing the North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented during the presidency of Bill Clinton, Sen. Hillary Clinton is struggling to stay in the race by presenting herself as the candidate who can solve the housing crisis.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120390365659689627.html?mod=fox_australian

Nader Announces He´ll Run Again For White House

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who was criticized by some Democrats as an election spoiler who helped swing the vote to George W. Bush in 2000, said he would run as an independent for the White House.
Calling the leading Republican and Democratic presidential candidates weak choices, Mr. Nader announced his bid yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press
By ROBERT GUY MATTHEWS February 25, 2008 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120386274009888761.html?mod=fox_australian

Castro Resigns as Cuba's President

Morning Edition, February 19, 2008 · Fidel Castro announced Tuesday he is stepping down as Cuba's president and commander-in-chief.
The Cuban president is 81 and has ruled Cuba for most of his life. But he hasn't been seen in public since he became ill and provisionally turned over his powers to his brother, Raul, in July 2006.
Castro's retirement was not a surprise. Cuba's National Assembly is scheduled to meet this weekend to elect a new president. Castro was in position to be the president again, but he hinted in December that he would not hang onto power indefinitely.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19157770&ft=1&f=1004

Chocolate's bittersweet economy

By Christian Parenti
Seven years after the industry agreed to abolish child labor, little progress has been made. Seventy percent of the world's cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, where working and living conditions are brutal and many workers are underage, see more in http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/24/news/international/chocolate_bittersweet.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008021510

Credit Suisse's CDO headache

The bank's $2.85 billion charge traces back to highly-rated CDOs traded in London whose valuation was questioned by auditors, sources say.
By Roddy Boyd, writer

New York (Fortune) -- Credit Suisse's stunning announcement that it is taking a $2.85 billion charge because it failed to properly value some bonds is a major black eye for a firm that has not been shy in touting its success in avoiding the pitfalls that have befallen its competitors.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/19/news/companies/boyd_cs.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008021917

Managing your business in a downturn

Don't expect the good times to roll for quite some time, says one of the Fortune 500's favorite management gurus. But smart executives can use the downturn to make their companies better, stronger, and faster. Here's how.
By Ram Charanhttp://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2008/02/18/103372936/index.htm

The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet – A ‘zettabyte’ by 2015?

An upsurge of technological change and a rising tide of new forms of data are working a deep transformation of the Internet’s capabilities and uses. In this third phase of Net evolution, network architectures and commercial business plans reflect the dominance of rich video and media traffic.
From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras—to 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence—the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th. We estimate that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1021 bytes), or one million million billion bytes.
We began using the term “exaflood” in 2001 to convey the vast gulf between the total traffic on the nation’s local area networks, then 15 exabytes a month, and the thousandfold smaller flows across the Internet. We predicted then that the deployment of broadband networks would bring exafloods of data to the Net. See complete text in http://www.discovery.org/a/4428 By: Bret Swanson & George Gilder
Discovery Institute
January 29, 2008

My Last Race

New Marketing Definition

The American Marketing Association (AMA), defines marketing as follows:

"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

http://appserver.marketingpower.com/blog/amablog/2008/01/the_american_marketing_associa.html