Personal Finance and Investing

Deputy to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has vowed to launch a rival site

As the political impact of sensitive diplomatic information continues to reverberate, a set of WikiLeaks spin-offs hopes to capitalise on the successes of the whistleblowing site and its Australian chief, Julian Assange.

The US and other authorities have cracked down on WikiLeaks and Assange since the site started publishing thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables that have embarrassed both the US and other parties around the world.

Assange, who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, seems to have inspired a flood of new gossip-mongering sites.

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As 2011 approaches and your year-end task list lengthens, we bring you a special PSA: Don’t forget to rebalance your investment and retirement portfolios. Rebalancing a portfolio is kind of like getting a haircut for your investments—you start off with the style you want, but it gets pretty messy unless you groom it every so often. The LearnVest deadline for visiting the financial barbershop is December 29th, but we know how much it sucks to pore over investments when you’d rather be enjoying Christmas and New Year festivities, so we recommend that you do this now. We’ll

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With every news channel reporting that shoppers spent $45 billion this past Black Friday alone, it is more than clear that the power of a well-publicized deal gets Americans to spend some serious cash!

This is seemingly great news for the economy, but what has actually changed for shoppers over this past year? The employment rate isn’t up, nor is the housing market—so why is spending this holiday season on the rise? Do Americans actually have more money to spend, or are they just overspending and racking up debt?

Early Bird Bargains.

Case in point: We ventured to the local GAP store at 6am on Black Friday with our friend Susan. The

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This week I had my socks knocked off! Which, after being in the industry for over 25 years, is tough to do. I came across a posting on Slashdot about a new mapping application from Google called GoogleEarth. At first my thinking was that this was just another extension of the already cool Google Maps online. But then I discovered that it was a downloadable client application. Humm. So I took the plunge. Then I lost over 4 hours of productivity for that day. (And I won’t mention how much since then.) And everyone I showed it to that day ended up gawking and drooling as well.GoogleEarth is a new application that jumps leaps and bounds over what we used to consider to be mapping applications. G

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