Sony has discovered that not only was their PlayStation and Qriocity services, but their Sony Entertainment Online was breached as well.
About 25 million user accounts were hacked into, including all user information. Sony believes that 12,000 user’s credit card info was hacked. Sony is offering some users 30 days free service to make up for the problem.
“We don’t even have minimum wage!”-German protester
“Fair wages, decent work and social security is the minimum that workers in this country expect, need and have to fight for again and again.”-Michael Sommer, head of Confederation of German Trade Unions
Germany is one of the few European countries that has a good economy. It turns out Germany’s good economy is coming at the expense of German workers.
Germans have been protesting, because they are not benefiting from the so called good economy, and now they will be competing against eastern European migrant workers.
For the first time since the creation of the European Union, Germany and Austria will open their borders to eastern European migrant workers. This has German workers upset, especially since they’ve seen a decline in wages while German corporations enjoy increased profits.
At least 8,000 workers protested in Berlin alone. According to the Confederation of German Trade Unions, approximately 423,000 people demonstrated across Germany on May Day.
Fast five had a midnight opening, April 29, in the United States. But, the Vin Diesel, U.S. franchise success, opened in Russia first.
In fact Vin Diesel told Russian media, on opening night in Moscow, that he “…wanna shoot a movie in Moscow so badly…”, adding that “…when you see Fast Five, you’ll hear Mia and Brian talk about Russia a lot.”
Fast Five opened in more than 10 countries, in the week prior to opening in the U.S., and has become the top money maker in most of those countries.
So what’s the sign of the times? The big money for “Hollywood” movies is not to be found here in the U.S. anymore, no thanks to the bad economy.
“If you hit Houston with a Category 4 or 5 (hurricane), and we’ve only got a couple billion dollars in the rainy day fund, instead of going in and rebuilding and recovering, we’re talking about bankruptcy. That’s the choice that we have here.”- Rick Perry, Governor of Texas
Texas Governor Rick Perry asked President Obama for help, two weeks ago, in fighting the biggest fires in Texas history. Obama has not responded.
FEMA is still trying to reply to the request for help from Texas. The problem? No money! Rachel Racusen, FEMA spokeswoman, says they’ve approved 22 grants to help local firefighting agencies, by there’s no money to fund the grants.
Maybe FEMA would have the money if our government wasn’t so happy with spending it on wars?
Russia has stopped exporting refined fuel, officially to deal with fuel shortages in Russia.
Russian officials hope the export ban will last only through May, but after that Russia will increase to costs of exporting their fuel. In any event, this move by Russia should add to the increasing fuel prices the world is paying.
I can’t help wonder if Russian leaders are taking advantage of a domestic situation to make things worse for the West, in retaliation for what the West is doing in Libya, and what the West is trying to do in Syria.
The Iranian oil producer, Iranian Offshore Oil Company, says their engineers have designed the world’s first drilling rig, that can operate both on shore, and off shore.
Once the rig becomes operational some 8,000-10,000 barrels of oil per day could be pumped. It’ll operate in Iran’s Salman oilfields.
Syria and Venezuela operate a joint refinery in Alfrekls in the Syrian state of Homs. Iran now wants to increase its role in the operation of the refinery.
Iran currently owns 26% of the Alfrekls refinery, which can produce 140,000 barrels of oil per day. Iran has expressed a desire to increase its investments in the refinery.
Iraq and Syria announced plans to build a pipeline for natural gas, from Iran.
The 2,000 kilometer (1,242 mile) line will end up supplying gas to Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.
Chrysler announced that it will pay back the U.S. and Canadian governments (taxpayers), but not because of increased profits.
Chrysler is trying to get money from private lenders, in order to pay back the government loans. This is a sign that Chrysler doesn’t think it can pay back the taxpayers, based on its sales/profits.
Also, Chrysler is hoping the private loans will be at lower interest rates, than what it’s paying to the governments. The interest rate for the U.S. loans are between 7%-14%, and the Canadians up to 20%. Gee looks like they didn’t get a deal, like most corporations. Is it because Chrysler is owned by a foreign company?
WalMart is going to sell guns again. It realized that part of its declining sales is because it stopped selling guns in about 2,000 stores back in 2006. Here in Idaho WalMart never stopped selling guns.
The move back to selling guns comes after seven straight quarterly losses for WalMart.
Selling guns is good for the U.S. economy, WalMart officials say most of the guns they sell are made in the U.S.