bq. Morning radio will soon lose one of its most familiar news anchors. Bob Edwards, who for nearly 25 years has greeted millions of weekday listeners with the distinctive and richly toned opener “This is ‘Morning Edition’ from NPR News,” is being replaced as host of that flagship morning program.
bq. Edwards said he found out early this month that he was being reassigned. “I was called into an office, and they said, ‘We’re making a change,”‘ he said. “You get a line like that, and I guess you should come back with some snappy rejoinder. But of course I did not. I was very surprised.” [via “Seattle PI”:http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/165990_npr24.html]
This is one voice I will miss. In American Media, where anchors try to hog the limelight, promote themselves and pay little attention to news, Bob was different. I liked his style of interviewing where he would be very brief with the question and let the other person tell the story. I cannot imagine the line “This is Morning Edition from NPR News” in a different voice.

Do workers strike in capitalist countries ? How do they end ? Do workers get what they want or do evil corporations get to run over them ?
For the past 4.5 months about 70,000 employees of grocery stores like Safeway, Albertsons and Kroger have been on strike, standing outside the stores with sign boards and requesting shoppers to shop elsewhere.
bq. Under the terms of the three-year agreement, current union members will not have to make any contributions toward their health care plan premiums in the first two years and will only need to pay between $5 to $15 in the third year if health care contributions in reserves are not sufficient to cover the costs.
bq. But the contract creates a second, lower tier of supermarket employees who will receive less pay and inferior benefits. New supermarket hires will have to pay about $9 a week for a basic health care plan and will make less than the average wages of $12 to $14. [via “Forbes”:http://www.forbes.com/markets/newswire/2004/02/29/rtr1280570.html]
But now it seems like the offer that the employees are accepting is the “same one they rejected”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-02-29-grocery-strike_x.htm when the strike started.

Few months back I wrote saying that Dow will cross 10,000 and Nasdaq, 2000 and soon “the economy will change”:https://varnam.org/archives/000268.html. Both the indices crossed these round figures in December. In 2003, the economy was improving, but it was a jobless recovery. But one of the forecasts is that soon jobs will “be created”:http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1231/p01s01-usec.html
bq. Still, the stronger growth will add about 1 million new jobs to the US economy, estimates Mark Zandi of Economy.com, an economic website. This will help to recoup some of the 2.4 million jobs that have been lost since February 2001, when unemployment started moving up. If things go well, “we’ll get half those jobs back,” says Mr. Zandi, who adds that there are still 8 million unemployed workers.
Already stock prices of many companies are going upto levels not seen in two years and I hope this will encourage the management to make more investments in product development.

After working as an investigative reporter for 36 years William Gaines retired to teach jouranlism at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. One of the assignments he gave his students was to find the identity of Deep Throat of Watergate fame.
Many attempts had been made before to find the identity of this person. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have said that they will not reveal the identity of this person till his death. So it has been all speculation so far.
The strategy taken by Gaines’ students was to search information to find out who all were present in Washington during the time Deep Throat met the jouranlists. Also from analysing the information, they concluded that only a member of FBI or White House would have access to the information which was revealed.
Finally, they narrowed it down to one person. Fred Fielding, an attorney and assistant to White House chief legal counsel John Dean.
bq. As far as we could determine, Fielding shared Deep Throat?s taste for cigarettes and whisky. He had access to information that Deep Throat corroborated for Woodward and Bernstein. And as student Robert Breslin found in 2002, Fielding even fit a characterization of the mysterious source that Woodward and Bernstein deleted from that early, unpublished draft of their book. The reporters wrote that Deep Throat was “perhaps the only person in government in a position to possibly understand the whole scheme and not be a potential conspirator himself.”
[via “Smithsonian”:http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues03/dec03/presence.html]

So I survived yet another earthquake. It happened at about 11 am today and I felt like I was feeling dizzy as the building was shaking. It lasted just a few seconds, but “people lost lives”:http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/West/12/22/ca.earthquake/index.html.
So this year I have survived “fire”:https://varnam.org/archives/000260.html, “flood”:https://varnam.org/archives/000267.html and earthquake.

The day after Thanksgiving is the craziest day in United States. That day stores offer crazy deals and the whole country “goes bonkers”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&e=9&u=/ap/trampled_shopper
bq. A mob of shoppers rushing for a sale on DVD players trampled the first woman in line and knocked her unconscious as they scrambled for the shelves at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.
bq. Patricia VanLester had her eye on a $29 DVD player, but when the siren blared at 6 a.m. Friday announcing the start to the post-Thanksgiving sale, the 41-year-old was knocked to the ground by the frenzy of shoppers behind her.
My Thanksgiving shopping consisted of going to Best Buy in the morning, finding that the whole world is inside, walking out immediately and going back to sleep.

And how is this job market going to pick up ? It is going to start with a trickle. People are so frustrated with their jobs now that if a better one comes, a lot of people are “going to quit”:http://money.cnn.com/2003/11/11/pf/q_iquit/index.htm.
bq. Consider, for example, that more than eight in 10 workers plan to look for a new job when the economy heats up, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Professionals. While there’s a difference between looking for a new gig and actually jumping ship, that kind of number is “very, very high,” says SHRP spokesman Frank Scanlon.
And why are so many people going to quit ?
bq. Many employees are overworked, stressed out, fed up — and eager to quit their jobs once the economy picks up. In fact, worker angst is so pronounced that it has surprised even the most tuned-in human resource professionals.
bq. The threat of pink slips has prompted plenty of people to work scared and to give everything to their jobs. Overtime isn’t that uncommon anymore. Nearly 40 percent of all workers spend at least 50 hours on the job per week.
As people quit, vacancies will be created. People will be moving around. Dow is now at 9,848.83 and Nasdaq at 1,973.11. Dow is soon going to go beyond 10,000 and Nasdaq above 2000. Since the American stock market is emotional, once these numbers are crossed, there will be some exhuberance, more spending and more hiring. Already, the “job market is picking up”:https://varnam.org/archives/000265.html.
Call this wishful thinking if you want. But don’t forget to thank me for predicting this, if it all comes true.

Couple of weeks back, here in Los Angeles, we were surrounded by “fire”:https://varnam.org/archives/000262.html. Today it is “flood”:http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-storm13nov13,1,5986774.story?coll=la-home-headlines.
bq. Powerful thunderstorms rumbled across Southern California Wednesday evening, hammering central Los Angeles and surrounding communities with torrential downpours that flooded roads and buildings and with lightning strikes that knocked out electrical power.
The rain today reminded me of the “monsoons”:https://varnam.org/archives/000149.html. There was thunder and lightning and I got a free car wash.

Now there are more fires burning. Some fires have combined together and are causing massive destruction. Gray Davis has “declared emergency”:http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/news/102603_AP_r2_cal_fires.html in two counties. There have been atleast 11 deaths so far. Out of that two people died in the car trapped in flames. 500 homes have been destroyed.
We were out doing groceries and the sun was up, but it was burning through the smoke which has filled the sky. So the sun has an orange color, like during sunset.
All local channels are now providing round the clock coverage and that’s the only thing we are watching.

We come back after “our vacation”:https://varnam.org/archives/000259.html and find that it’s “fire all”:http://msnbc.com/news/983543.asp?0cv=CA01 around us.
bq. Since it began Tuesday, the fire in the foothills of San Bernardino County has damaged or destroyed seven homes, said Bill Peters, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry. About 1,700 people had been evacuated, according to county sheriff’s spokeswoman Sandy Fatland.
We live about 40 miles away from San Bernadino and Rancho Cucumonga. The sky is filled with smoke and the sun was not visible during daytime yesterday. Actually while driving back from Las Vegas, we saw this fire on the mountains and did not think much about it. Forest fires are common here during summer. This one seems to be out of control now and houses are being destroyed.