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As we’ve been wondering what to do with our political interest now that THE election is over, here is a suggestion: Why not take part in politics ourselves?

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Today, Friday, the U.S. government announced the highest unemployment rate (6.5%) since 1994. October marked the 10th consecutive month of decline on the job market. Since August, the U.S. economy has lost 651,000 jobs, October accounting for 240,000 jobs alone, totaling 1.2 million lost jobs so far this year.

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I know… it sounds like a relic from the 70s or something, which it actually is. But obviously it’s one of those ideas that even gain relevance over time.

As we now hear Starbucks will be closing more than 600 stores in the US alone, which probably no one will even notice because they have more than 10,000 of them over here.

That said, I have to add that I really feel for the 1000 people losing their already underpaid jobs. But it also shows that there is not unlimited demand for ever the same products. I admit that it gereally makes sense to have chain stores in some respect. But it also makes traveling (and living) so not exciting at times, because it kills cultural particularities.

Her comes a sermon by Reverend Billy, founder of the Church of Stop Shopping, getting the word out to the masses on Fox Biz News:

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“Budweiser will be brewed in the same breweries … by the same people, according to the same recipe,” Carlos Brito, InBev’s chief executive officer told CNN, after his company had finally closed the deal on buying Anheuser-busch – the American company that brews Budweiser Beer. Alas, this won’t settle it with the die-hard fans of an American icon, who accuse InBev of merely paying lip-service to keep this piece of Americana alive.

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Thank God Obama stuck to guns and religion, when trying to illustrate the big bind America has gotten itself into over the last years. One can only imagine what would have happened, if he had been deemed elitist for stressing an even (literally) bigger one: obesity. The Mister Softee jingle (“Bubblicious RMX” feat. Celine Dion and Enrique Iglesias) would go triple platinum, Ronald McDonald would clinch a last-minute nomination and pull home an election landslide, and Coca-Cola would break the NASDAQ after announcing its plan to fuse with leading water providers to deliver sparkling soft drinks fresh from the tap.

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Today, Princeton Professor and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman held a lecture at the FU Berlin. You know what follows now: Liveblog ist back! Again, only in German, since I can type faster this way.

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Two and a half months into the writer’s strike and the first late night shows are back on the screen. In the first week of January, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien all returned to restore nightly TV routine. A week later, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show followed suit. How did Jon Stewart do? Did he survive out there without the scripted gags of his humoristic elves and their mighty pens?

To find out, we tried to get into the studio and watch the taping of his first show back on air. Unfortunately, about 500 other people had the same idea. Instead of lining up at the end of the queue around the block, we talked to one of the protesting writers in front of the studio. [Read more]

Yesterday, the much anticipated search engine of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been released into the online world. The idea behind Wikia Search is to create a search engine that ranks the results according to user ratings.

But surprisingly, this core function hasn’t been enabled yet. All users can do so far is write so called “mini articles” that give a brief definition of a search term. This leads to rather limited search results, since the basic principle of this “social” search isn’t implemented yet. At least the founders know that, too.

It will be interesting to see whether Wikia Search really has the potential to turn around the way we search the internet- which by now is dominated so much by Google’s search engine that the term “to google” has come to mean any kind of internet searching. With this unseen- before power Google has come to dominate our perception of the outside world- what you can’t google isn’t really there, is it?

So far, Wikia Search has the inherent problem of any community- based project. As long as only few people use it, it doesn’t have much to offer to other potential users. But only if many people start using it, it will become better, so for right now, it’s a toss-up.

Stay tuned.

By Jessica Binsch

FOX Business News launched yesterday; the channel has been on air since 5am EDT, same for the website. Here is how they kicked it off:

A Business News Station had been in Rupert Murdoch’s sketch book for quite a while, although FOX Business Networks (FBN) has to share the market with CNBC - reaching almost 90 million households alone - and Bloomberg. FBN will only be broadcasted to 30 million homes in the beginning. So what’s it going to be? A conservative, big-business friendly PR-machine? [Read more]