BEIJING, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Chinese regulators have told domestic banks to stop interbank lending to U.S. financial institutions to prevent possible losses during the financial crisis, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday.

The Hong Kong newspaper cited unidentified industry sources as saying the instruction from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) applied to interbank lending of all currencies to U.S. banks but not to banks from other countries.

"The decree appears to be Beijing's first attempt to erect defences against the deepening U.S. financial meltdown after the mainland's major lenders reported billions of U.S. dollars in exposure to the credit crisis," the SCMP said.

WASHINGTON -- New claims for unemployment benefits jumped last week to their highest level in seven years due to the impact of a slowing economy and Hurricanes Ike and Gustav, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

The department said new requests for jobless benefits for the week ending Sept. 20 increased by 32,000 to a seasonally-adjusted 493,000, much higher than analysts' expectations of 445,000.

New home sales fall to 17-year low
Sales pace of new homes lowest since January 1991 as prices hit a four-year low and inventory remains high.

Countdown to a Meltdown



The lives we know... There's not much time left. Godspeed. I wish you all the best. Be kind to one another.

The RIAA said Beckerman, one of the nation's few attorneys who defends accused file sharers, "has maintained an anti-recording industry blog during the course of this case and has consistently posted virtually every one of his baseless motions on his blog seeking to bolster his public relations campaign and embarrass plaintiffs," the RIAA wrote (.pdf) in court briefs. "Such vexatious conduct demeans the integrity of these judicial proceedings and warrants this imposition of sanctions."

Lory Lybeck, a Washington state defense attorney leading a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing the RIAA of allegedly engaging in "sham" litigation tactics, said the RIAA's motion comes from the same organization that has sued about 30,000 people over the last five years for file sharing, some of them falsely. It's the same organization, he said, that has sued dead people, the elderly and even children -- all while using unlicensed investigators.

One of the extremely painful lessons of our time, I'm convinced, will be that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the real. It will be painful because the notion of virtuality has become a psychological crutch for a culture that is recklessly destructive of real places, real experiences, real relationships with real people, and real notions of purposeful, decent behavior.
One of the most popular beliefs of the computer era has been that virtual places are every bit as okay as real places. This idea gained popularity in direct proportion to the spread of immersively ugly, monotonous, dysfunctional suburban environments through the 1980s and 90s. The more our nation came to be composed of crappy housing subdivisions, highway strips, Big Box fiefdoms, and parking wastelands, the more appealing the idea of virtual reality became.
For one thing, it was a way of turning the lack of something into an opportunity to sell more products. The lack of town centers in suburbia led to malls. The lack of access to either complex integral townscapes or real rural landscapes led to theme parks or, in the case of Las Vegas, fragmentary ersatz urbanism. The general impoverishment of the public realm - or the relegation of it to mere decorative berms between zoning categories - was compensated for by the exorbitant internal luxury of new private houses, with their home theaters, "great rooms," and three-car garages.
For adults the result has been an amazing amount of pervasive situational loneliness. Despite the fact that so many Americans own a car there is no place to go, at least no places of casual socializing unrelated to chain store commerce. So the chat rooms and listserves of the Internet are supposed to take the place of actually being somewhere.
For children, this trend has been catastrophic because they lack the mobility to use environments designed solely for motoring. This consigns kids either to nebulous low-grade hangouts in the left over scrap places of suburbia - the 7-Eleven parking lot, the storm sump, the wooded "buffer" between the housing tract and the strip mall - or to virtual and heavily commercialized public realms of television and the computer, which include rentable movies, the Internet, and computer games.

VB: No, I’m thinking more of investors and shareholders. Maybe they can’t tell as easily. The stock hasn’t moved in any great directions.
JR: I don’t think the investors give a shit about our quality. They care about our earnings per share. They wait for it to happen. We had three years where we didn’t make our expectations. If I were an investor, I would wait and see. That’s fine with me.

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John Riccitiello,

Your thoughts are apparent in Spore. I've played the game and it just isn't very good. I've had more fun with a ball tied to a cup.