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It started with subprime mortgages. Now owners of McMansions are defaulting, and the effects of the housing bust are beginning to ripple through the economy.

It’s going to get a lot worse….

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The long-running drama between the RIAA and Debbie Foster is about to come to an end, but not without an additional bit of fighting about the attorneys’ fees. After Debbie Foster triumphed in the copyright infringement case brought against her by the record labels, she sought and obtained an award for attorneys’ fees. After the RIAA exhausted its appeals—and after some further prodding from Foster—it finally cut Foster a check for $68,685.23 on August 30.

Case closed, right? Wrong. Foster subsequently filed a motion to amend the attorneys’ fees award citing two major factors: the amount of the payment and the way in which it was paid. Although the RIAA paid in full up to the time that the amount of the award was finalized, it neglected to include fees incurred by Foster’s attorney pertaining to a hearing on July 5. It also neglected to include the interest that had accrued since the date of the award.

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In an order issued earlier today, Judge Lee R. West pointed out that it’s not the fault of the plaintiffs that the bank places a hold on checks and said that there is no authority barring the payment of attorneys’ fees by check. Judge West denied Foster’s motion to amend the judgment but instructed the RIAA to calculate post-judgment interest and cut Foster another check on or before September 13. Once that has occurred, he’ll rule on the RIAA’s motion to deem the attorneys’ fees judgment satisfied.

Given how the whole case played out, there’s little surprise that it is ending with this level of acrimony. At the end of the day, Foster has been cleared of copyright infringement, while the RIAA is left paying the legal bills for both parties.

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I think you can safely say this wasn’t what the owner had in mind when he threw that “launch party”. Actually, the yacht was being loaded onto a cargo ship for delivery when something went wrong and it crashed nose first into the ocean. Yeah, that’s gotta suck but probably not nearly as much as it did for the guy that went along for the ride (top right, rear of the boat). Great job by the photographer though getting these photos. Can you say Yee Haw!!

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Dear seasoned reviewers, like Greg Miller of IGN (pictured and whose work back at the Columbia Tribune we covered), you’re reviewing Lair wrong — according to Sony. Miller, and probably many other reviewers, received their copies today of the “Lair Reviewer’s Guide” so that they might go back and say, “Yes Sony, we totally don’t know how to play video games, thank you! Thank you so much for showing us the light on how to play these … things. We will now go back and redo our scores with the wealth of information we have been given.”

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Suddenly Osama is a different guy:

The timing of the release makes me wonder: was the tape produced at Langley or in the White House basement?

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His appearance at the Sydney Opera House began inauspiciously: Mr. Bush started 10 minutes late, to allow APEC workers to hustle people out of the theater’s balcony to fill empty portions of the orchestra section below that were visible on camera.

Once on stage, he’d only reached the third sentence when he committed his first gaffe:

“Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit,” Mr. Bush said to Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Unfortunate in that he was addressing attendees at APEC, the annual meeting of leaders from 21 Pacific Rim nations, not OPEC, the cartel of 12 major oil producers.

Mr. Bush quickly corrected himself. “APEC summit,” he said forcefully, joking that the confusion was because Howard had invited him to the OPEC summit next year (though neither Australia nor the United States is an OPEC member).

The president’s next goof went uncorrected, at least immediately. Talking about Howard’s visit to Iraq last year to thank his country’s soldiers serving there, Mr. Bush referred to them as “Austrian troops” – though the official text released by the White House and posted on whitehouse.gov fixed it to “Australian.”

After his speech, Mr. Bush confidently headed out – the wrong way.

He strode away from the lectern on a path that would have sent him over a steep drop. Howard and others saved him, redirecting the president to center stage, where there were steps leading down to the floor of the theater.

video

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The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.

Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea-level rise and make predictions this February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change far too low.

The glacier at Ilulissat, which supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago.

Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat yesterday: “We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year.”