According to Robert Peston, BBC business editor, the best thing the coalition can hope is a declaration from the bankers volunteer to give lesser bonuses without the involvement of the government.

Big bonuses by banks are openly opposed by Business Secretary Vince Cable. He reportedly said that the government is ready for robust action on curbing bonuses.

It is the wish of the government that banks should lend more to small businesses.

As per the reports, a senior bank official says that banks may not come forward with a solid declaration on reducing bonuses. Some reports say that salaries of bank employees are up by up to 40 percent, effectively buffering any cuts in bonus payments.

Insiders say that banks are in the process of adjusting pay packages as per the new rules coming into force throughout Europe. The rules were agreed upon last month. The rules are aimed at reducing short term risk taken by the bankers. Short term risk is the alleged reason for the recent financial crisis.

The government had to bail out some banks by injecting billions of pounds in banking sector. As such, some say that the government’s stand on curbing bank bonuses should be positively considers by banks.

The banks are against bonus curbs saying that they may lose employees to foreign banks. The government is asking the banks to lend more to small businesses in the hope that small businesses can boost economy.

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Ted Williams

A pauper former radio announcer with a magic voice is rediscovered by an Ohio reporter and he is having a great comeback.

A reporter of Columbus Dispatch newspaper posted a video on YouTube, of a former radio announcer, who is now on roads begging for a living. The video has paved way to his come back.

Ted Williams, aged 53 is now employed after falling down from a promising career as a radio announcer. Wednesday will remain a memorable day for him, forever; who used to beg on a street during the day with a cardboard sign and slept in a temporary tent behind an old petrol station at night. He was homeless and hopeless, till the reporter chanced to come across him on Wednesday. He is now getting job offers.

According to reports, the video on Ted Williams received some eight million hits. He is rediscovered by a Columbus Dispatcher reporter in Ohio. Ted told the reporter that he visited his mother in New York for the fist time after a long gap of 20 years.

He told the reporter that he felt like Susan Boyle or Justin Bieber, admitting that ‘it almost’ chocked him. He has been without a place to live for the last ten years.

His life was beautiful, with a family of five children and a radio career. He took to drugs and alcohol. He lost interest in his career and landed himself on roads.

After the video on YouTube, it is reported that he got a full time job with basketball team the Cleveland Cavaliers. The job is full time announcing work

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Oil Pipeline Between Russia and China

The first ever pipe line between Russia and China began working.

The pipe line has the distinction of connecting the largest producer of crude oil on the globe i.e. Russia and the largest user of the same i.e. China. This effectively puts an end to the earlier method of transporting oil to China from Russia through rail.

The pipe line is between Russian, Siberia and Daqing; a Chinese city in northeastern area of the country. It will considerably boost oil export to China from Russia. Russia’s major network of oil pipe lines are situated in western part of Siberia. Till now the network catered to the export needs of Europe.

Some 15 million tones of Russian oil is expected to flow through the pipe line to China per year in the coming twenty years, amounting to 300,000 barrels per day. Russia is producing more oil than Saudi Arabia, the one time largest producer of oil in the world, since 2009. China became the largest consumer of oil in the world, overthrowing the United States only last year.

The project cost amounts nearly to 16 billion U S dollars, out of which partly is met by Chinese loans. Yao Wei, general manager of the Petro China pipe line branch expressed hope that the opening of the China Russia crude oil pipe line will begin a new era in energy cooperation between the two countries. He inaugurated the pipe line by switching open the flow of oil. The Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin said that the pipe line will be instrumental in diversifying oil exports.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is about to step down this January.

California Governor Schwarzenegger’s journey from Austria through Hollywood to Californian Governor’s office is a saga, as interesting a story as the script of his nail biting films. His tenure as the Governor of California is coming to an end this January.

He oversaw the most populated state of United States of America for seven long years and handing over the office to Jerry Brown on Monday. Jerry Brown is a Democratic candidate, who won the coveted position by beating Meg Whiteman, a business woman belonging to Republican Party in the elections that were held in November last year. She is a billionaire.

Governor Schwarzenegger was born in Austria. He is top notch bodybuilder. He was a Mr. Universe some time back. He is a world famous Hollywood star often doing action oriented roles. He contested in the special recall election in 2003 and breezed through to become 38th Californian Governor. It is the best ever role the muscle builder Hollywood star had played. With dedication and hard work he became a model first, and then Hollywood star from an ordinary body builder immigrant from Austria. He came in as a replacement to the unpopular Governor Gray Davis. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Republican candidate in the elections. He represented new hopes, dreams and enthusiasm.

The Californian voters approved him quickly. They were eager to give Schwarzenegger a chance and actor turned governors are not new to California. One such governor, Ronal Regan eventually became the President of United States. Governor Schwarzenegger will be fondly remembered for his active role in making laws against global warming. He backed hydrogen powered cars. Californians will miss their flamboyant governor, with big cigars, serious looking body guards and live broadcasts of his events and programs.

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The net phone giant – Skype, through a post in its blog detailed about the causes of the crash of its service for two days just before the Christmas day. Overloaded server and the bug in the Skype software for the Windows are cited as the reasons for the outage.

The combined occurrence of these two problems created the hitch in the gush which made the service unusable in the busiest time of the year. The firm is in the process of revamping the technology to prevent any further occurrence of the problem.

In fact the problem started on December 22nd in the servers handling instant messaging when it got overloaded. Messaging from Skype through the Windows machine got delayed and the bug in one version of Skype combined with the overloaded servers created a total crash in the communication system.

More than half of the Skype users were running the service on the buggy software. The situation became rather grave when the servers running on buggy software got crashed and the remaining servers got over loaded due to the crash of other servers.

Mr. Lars Rabbe, the Chief Information Officer of Skype said that they had found the initial crash in the network happened just before the peak hour of the day. The running servers which act as supernodes in the event of crash got overloaded traffic to the extent of 100 times more than what they are expected to handle usually at that time. This caused the shutdown of more supernodes and crash in the entire network.

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Queensland Premier Anna Bligh reported that, the floods have affected almost 200,000 individuals spanning an area bigger than France and Germany together and she added the disaster may prolong. An internal source has informed that around 4,000 people have been relocated. On Friday, the weather was drier, although the levels of water in some areas are rising.

The first stop of Ms Gillard was Bundaberg, which was worst flood-hit in four decades. The good news is that the water levels are now receding. She spoke to the communities and evacuees. She was also briefed with the rescue effort.

The Prime Minister is also expected to visit Emerald, a town in central Queensland. Emerald has 11,000 residents and 1,200 of them already been evacuated. There water has reached about 16 meter. The rescue team included Army Black Hawks. They are also working for evacuating residents to a safer place.

In Rockhampton, the situation is more severe. The rescue team says the rising water can cut the city off by a few days. There are some towns, Theodore and Condamine, whose residents have been completely evacuated by the rescue teams though some of the families refused to leave their houses. It is expected that the recovery work may cost more than billions of dollars.

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The well appreciated Kodachrome film is facing extinction as its sales plummeted because of the competition from digital cameras. The makers of the film, Kodak said that it was stopping the production of the film in 2009, finally bowing out to stiff competition by digital media.

Kodachrome was first made in 1935. It was commercially successful color film. It was also useful to shoot movies. Reliable quality, true to life colors and the ability to last long made the film very popular with photographic fraternity. It was appreciated by both professionals and amateurs equally.

The processing of the film is difficult, requiring skilled personnel. Only Dwayne’s Photo is the only surviving family of Kodachrome developers. It is in Kansas. The last film is reportedly exposed by the owner of the firm Dwayne Steinle. The firm is flooded with developing orders from photographers who are stanch loyalists to the film. They have been keeping the sought after film years together.

A single customer bought some 1,580 rolls of the film to shoot railroad engines exclusively. The films made some 50,000 slides costing 15,798 dollars for processing. BBC photo editor Phil Coomes made a documentary on the final days of the famous film. Kodachrome users are welcome to share their photos on his blog of BBC. Another well known user of Kodachrome is Steve McCurry of National Geographic. His world famous cover photo of an Afghan girl is shot on Kodachrome.

The final roll of the film produced, belonged to McCurry by Kodak. He clicked some photos on an India tribe and shot images of actor Robert DeNiro, Kansas and New York in a documentary journey film sponsored by National Geographic. He took the film personally to Dwayne’s Photo previously this year.

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The man was sentenced for two years and eight months. The Swede, Anders

Hoegstorem was an ex-neo-Nazi leader. He entered into a plea bargain last month and admitted the theft. He was detained in Sweden and he will serve his sentence in Sweden. The sign that became popular for all the wrong reasons was recovered three days after it was stolen in a damaged condition last December.

Another two Polish men were also sentenced by the judge in Krakow. They were facing a two and half years of jail term, said a Polish media report. One of them, Andrzej S had reportedly repented for the crime in the court.

The sign in question is about 16 feet long and a loose translation of the signs means as ‘work sets you free’. It is made of wrought iron. It became symbolic for Nazi atrocities towards humanity in general and Jews in particular. Around 1.1 million people were killed in Auschwitz camp.

The sign was repaired after recovery and was kept in Auschwitz museum. Another replica of the sign is now at the entrance. The 34 year old Swedish convict at first denied the charges. Later, he changed his stand. He was arrested in February last year. Three other poles were sentenced to prison terms previously in this year. However, one kingpin, who supposedly ordered the theft, was still untraceable. The whereabouts or the identity of the person is not known as yet.

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Bobby Farrell

Bobby Farrell was the front man and the only member of the 1970s era disco band passed away in his sleep. He was 61 years of age.

His agent, John Seine informed that Farrell died in a hotel room of a Russian city, St Petersburg. He was performing there. He added that the singer’s cause of death is not yet ascertained. He told that the singer had experienced breathlessness on Wednesday. The singer had reportedly complained of the problem once before the show and later after the show that was destined to be his last performance.

The singer’s original name was Alfonso Farrell. He was born in Aruba, a place in Caribbean Island. He stared to work as a sailor at an early age of 15, leaving home. Later he went to Norway and Germany and concentrated on becoming a DJ. 1974 was an important year in his career as he was selected to lead a group founded by a German lyricist and singer Frank Farian. The group is called Boney M.

Ferrell is scheduled for a TV show in Rome and he is about to fly there on Friday. Though Boney M group was disbanded in 1986, he continued his career as a singer and enthralled fans world wide. Recently he was touring with three female singers. He called his group as Bobby Farrell of Boney M. He had a son and a daughter.

Farrell is known as a showman, a dancer and he made a number of male vocals for Boney M. He is also known for his gaudy costumes. He is usually seen on stage topless and in skin tight bell bottoms which were fashion of those days. Boney M’s first recorded hit was in 1978, Daddy Cool. Rivers of Babylon, the group’s UK number was also released in 1978. In Britain it had registered a sale of about two million records topping the lists for about five weeks.

His agent revealed that the singer is having health problems related to heart, stomach and respiratory system for the last ten years. He told that Ferrell is magnanimous and explosive, describing the singer as a ‘fantastic person’.

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The union leader gave a new year message to his colleagues in which he professed that there will be cuts every where in the coming year, cuts in standards of living, cuts in jobs and so on. He predicted a dismal scenario.

He warned that the coming year will be a difficult year for the government as it have to face more and more angry protests. Another leader of the Public and Commercial Services Union, Mark Serwotka said that it is eminent that the union will resort to strikes if needed. The leader talked to the Times news paper. He says that, the more union members stand up against cuts, the more problems can be created to the government, there by exercising more pressure, so that the government takes their stand seriously enough to come for negotiations. He said that the government has to realize the fact that the union is ready to fight and is committed.

The Times says that the senior leaders are planning to attend a TUC meeting in the first week of New Year to discuss their stand on the proposed cuts. It appears that the union is taking every measure to apply pressure on government to meet its demands against cuts.

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