Where are the big Democratic donors? and more

Where are the big Democratic donors?

The big Democratic donors who helped fuel Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign aren’t as enthusiastic this year. Contributions from financial firms are down 68 percent; from lawyers and law firms, down 47 percent; and from the entertainment industry, down 49 percent. The campaign is relying more heavily on small donors, with 58 percent of total fund-raising coming in checks of less than $200.

The New York Times

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Jobless and underemployed college graduates

About 54 percent of college graduates under the age of 25 were jobless or underemployed in low-paying, unskilled positions last year.

Associated Press

Playing subway chicken in New York City

Some New York City teenagers have begun playing a game they call “subway chicken,” in which they jump onto the tracks and stay there as long as possible as a train pulls into the station. The track-jumping teens depicted in a new YouTube video “should have their heads examined,” said transit officials, noting that 146 people were hit by subway trains last year, 47 fatally.

NBCNewYork.com

Traffic on the Web's largest porn site

The largest porn site on the Web gets 4.4 billion page views per month, or about triple the traffic of CNN or ESPN. The average time spent on a porn site, according to Google’s DoubleClick, is between 15 and 20 minutes, compared with three to six for a nonporn site.

ExtremeTech.com

Big jump in measles cases

The U.S. last year had its worst year for measles since 1996. The 222 measles cases were a big jump from the usual 60 or so per year, and 86 percent occurred in people who weren’t vaccinated against the illness—including 50 children whose parents got exemptions from school vaccinations.

The Washington Post

Correction: In the April 20 issue, a Noted item incorrectly stated that 41 percent of the students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are foreign students on visas. We should have said 41 percent of MIT’s graduate science and engineering students are foreign. The item concerned the FBI’s efforts to stop countries such as China and Iran from using foreign students at U.S. universities as spies to steal scientific and technological research.