Politalking

You heard it here first! You heard it here only… Well, anyway, Politalking is to undergo a shift away from the more news-oriented format we used in the past. Rather than news, we will be focusing on writing about singular news stories about technology, science, media and a little bit of politics, less of the industrial business mentions we were doing before.

Why? Well, it became something of a downer constantly writing about bankruptcies and collapses and frauds and wars and all those other intensely depressing things which are occurring in the world. Unfortunately for us, we simply don’t have the power or influence to make writing about such things truly worthwhile on any sort of philanthropic plain.

So, instead, we turn out proverbial pens to the work of technology, science and media, where the developments and evolution are always interesting and worth discussion in this modern age.

We hope you all enjoy the new version of Politalking, which may have a name change, when it comes back very soon.

Until then, thanks for reading, and sleep tight…

Hello folks!

So, Politalking will be back to business on Monday December 29, just in time for some New Year’s cheer to filter through.

It should be a very cool year coming up as we try to introduce some new things to the blog, including a number of potential guest posts and opinion pieces in the work. It’s also likely that we will slightly refocus on providing less of your everyday news and more of just interesting stories from around the world that spark a beat of passion in our lives. Also, more arts posts to liven up the dull walls in our offices.

I hope Christmases were merrily had and will see all of you on the other side.

Is there really a requirement to photoshop down the waist of Jessica Alba?

Is Manny Picquaio a great crime fighter?

The religious case for gay marriage.

John Thain, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, is apparently sparring with the board over his bonus for the year. The boss, of the bank which was forced to broker a deal to save itself by selling to Bank of America, asked for $10m, allegedly.

The Big Three have been given until after Thanksgiving to work on a better case to present to Congress as House Democrats somehow managed to appease both sides. The case for a $25bn bailout of the US automotive industry was apparently just not that convincing enough. They make a good point in the article that the three car-manufacturing head honchos ended up making absolute fools of themselves flying in private jets to ask for money.

[Source - MSNBC]

Penny Pritzker, the Chicago-based billionaire and member of the titular, super-rich family, has turned down becoming Commerce Secretary in Barack Obama’s administration.

It had been reported earlier that Pritzker was running into some business issues which would have excluded her from consideration.

First we get the Large Hadron Supercollider threatening to destroy the world and now this. Scientists may have detected the presence of dark matter in a series of experiments using balloon-borne equipment in Antarctica. This story also came up in my feed from Ars Technica and I’ve got to give them credit for writing a sentence that pushes pretty much all my buttons:

Researchers suggest that the finding is consistent with the annihilation of dark matter particles predicted by a theory that requires extra dimensions.

I’m a sucker for extra dimensions.

[Source - New Scientist]

Soon-to-be-former Vice President Dick Cheney has been indicted by South Texas court on (among others) charges of alleged prisoner abuse. The charges stem from Cheney’s financial involvement with the Vanguard Group, an investment firm that has concerns with the private prison companies that run federal detention centres. It’s somewhat of a hokey charge but an interesting read nonetheless.

[Source - Houston Chronicle]

Also, check out the following piece at Huffington Post which asks the question of whether Cheney will pardon himself for these charges.

[Source - Huffington Post]

Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff for the Obama administration, has challenged chief executives and CEOs in the US to take up the challenge of pushing universal healthcare under an Obama presidency.

From The Wall Street Journal: 

“When it gets rough out there, a lot of business leaders get out of the car and say, ‘We’re OK with minor reform.’ I’m challenging you today, we’re going to have to do big, serious things,” Rahm Emanuel said, speaking to The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, a conference convened to elicit corporate opinion on the challenges facing the new president.

The Curious Capitalist argues that US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson should stop attempting to explain the increasingly incomprehensible bailout plan for banking and money markets. He recently stuttered and spluttered his way through a House Financial Services Committee meeting regarding the previous plan to buy toxic mortgage assets from financial institutions, now dumped.

Maybe he’s right. Without clear answers amid a highly-fragile economy, Paulson may want to start watching his words in case they be taken the wrong way.

There seems to have been a slight surge in Somali pirate activity of late and the latest chapter involves the seizing of the Sirius Star, a supertanker that was carrying around 2 million barrels of oil.

[Source - Channel 4]

Politalking is a new blog which will focus primarily on politics, current affairs and business news through bitesize pieces of interesting items from around the net. More of this will be revealed in coming weeks as it gets moving but, until then, expect stories from across the ’serious’ news space.

The blog has been prompted by a serious problem for me with the amount of coverage given to ’soft’ news (most notably, the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross ‘controversy’) and I just wanted to make something that I and my friends could read which tries to keep focus on the most important and interesting stories around.

I hope you all enjoy the blog and get involved in the comments space as and when you feel it necessary.