[Quote:]

The English is clear enough to lorry drivers – but the Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

I think I know what my next email vacation-message is going to be…

[Quote:]

McCain aides called it a “miscommunication,” but once I got on the bus I called Wurzelbacher myself and asked him what really happened.

He told me that he had hoped to come to the morning rally, but that no one from McCain’s campaign ever called him back to confirm,

Bigger ooops.

He said he had heard McCain yelled for him and he wasn’t there, and Joe was “not happy about it.”

It turns out, as soon as camp McCain realized the error, they sent a car for Wurzelbacher and raced him to hook up with McCain’s bus caravan, which was making its way across Ohio.

Shortly after 2pm in a sunny, picturesque town square in Sandusky, Ohio, McCain was speaking to a crowd under a Gazebo and called Joe’s name.

This time, he answered.

He jumped on the stage, and the crowd went wild.

[Quote:]

The American International Group is rapidly running through $123 billion in emergency lending provided by the Federal Reserve, raising questions about how a company claiming to be solvent in September could have developed such a big hole by October. Some analysts say at least part of the shortfall must have been there all along, hidden by irregular accounting.

“You don’t just suddenly lose $120 billion overnight,” said Donn Vickrey of Gradient Analytics, an independent securities research firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Mr. Vickrey says he believes A.I.G. must have already accumulated tens of billions of dollars worth of losses by mid-September, when it came close to collapse and received an $85 billion emergency line of credit by the Fed. That loan was later supplemented by a $38 billion lending facility.

[..]

The internal auditor resigned and is now in seclusion, according to a former colleague. His account, from a prepared text, was read by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in a hearing this month.

[Quote:]

Mr. Obama’s 30-minute commercial, which played on seven networks, broadcast and cable, was seen by 33.55 million viewers, according to figures released by Nielsen Media Research. On the three broadcast networks that carried the special, the audience totaled more than 25 million, easily surpassing the number for the last World Series game on Fox, which averaged 19.8 million viewers. The special was also available on Univision, and three cable networks, MSNBC, BET and TV One.

“I was shocked by the number Obama was able to draw,” said Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. “It’s just a stunning number.”

And in it, he didn’t even mention McCain once… he didn’t need to.

[Quote:]

Atari has appointed law firm Davenport Lyons to prosecute illegal file-sharers.

It has been acting on behalf of several games firms and partner David Gore thinks there are likely to be many more.

[..]

In the case of the Murdochs, a letter was sent giving them the chance to pay £500 compensation or face a court case.

Gill Murdoch and her husband, aged 54 and 66 respectively, told Which: “We do not have, and have never had, any computer game or sharing software. We did not even know what ‘peer to peer’ was until we received the letter.”

The case has now been dropped by Atari, although the firm is yet to comment on the reasons why.

According to Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers.

He is pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and has spoken to “hundreds” of others, he told the BBC.

“Some of them are senior citizens who don’t know what a game is, let alone the software that allows them to be shared,” he said.

It’s rare that I miss anything because of AdBlock, but this time I have. Here’s some reader mail I just received (thanks, Albert!)

Rasmussen is out with their predictions for Tuesday, which include the
projection that Obama will win the electoral battle, 364 to 174. Nice to
hear, of course.

But on the page right now, just an inch or so above the prediction of his
gloom, is a McCain/Palin ad, the text of which reads: