cnnmoneytech:

Photo: CNNMoney

Meet the members of the triple-A club: The four U.S. companies that currently have a higher S&P credit rating than the U.S. itself. 

Microsoft is flying the flag for the tech sector. Where’s the rest of our leading lights — like Apple? Turns out having $75 billion in liquid assets means never having to say “I’d like to borrow money.” Apple doesn’t issue corporate debt, and therefore has no rating.

But some other tech stalwarts have surprisingly less-than-pristine ratings. S&P gives Google (which has a $35 billion cash stash) an AA-, and IBM gets a A+ (a rating that hasn’t changed since 1998). -Stacy

abcworldnews:

Fire rages through a building in Tottenham, north London early Sunday Aug. 7, 2011, as trouble flared after members of the community took to the streets to protest over the alleged police shooting which killed a local man last Thursday. (/AP Photo) (Taken with instagram)

theatlantic:

With Media Distracted, There’s No Rush to Aid Somalia

Today’s New York Times tackles an important dimension of the faminebattering drought-stricken Somalia: With the media focused on stories like the U.S. debt ceiling debate, the U.K. phone hacking scandal, and theNorway shooting rather than hunger in east Africa, relief organizations are having a hard time raising money. “The overwhelming problem is that the American public is not seeing and feeling the urgency of this crisis,” a Unicef executive tells the paper (a cartoon in The Times of London recently made a similar point more controversially, depicting a starving Somali child saying, “I’ve had a bellyfull of phone hacking”).

The data does appear to back up the claim, though the famine is certainly generating coverage. In the two weeks since the U.N. officially declared a famine in parts of Somalia, the story hasn’t registered on Pew’s News Coverage Index, with the debt crisis, phone hacking scandal, and Norway shooting driving the news cycle instead.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire

thedailyfeed:

Our map of economic hell has all of this week’s bad news. Sorry, tumblr.