Linda Thompson — the mayor of the fiscally hurting Harrisburg, Pa. — has attempted everything from budget slashing to layoffs to bankruptcy filings to get the state capital's finances back on track. Nothing has worked. So now she's taking a different approach: She's staging a three-day hunger strike, hoping at some point during her calorically-deprived hallucinations, God will point the way towards an economic recovery.

McDonald's just introduced a brand new line of New York-themed sandwiches at their locations throughout the Czech Republic.

Microsoft is buying Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian company, for $1.2 billion. Ostensibly, this is meant to bolster the search function within Microsoft's Office business. But I read it as an admission that Microsoft's multibillion-dollar annual R&D budget can't buy it a fighting chance against Google. Microsoft keeps spending more on "improving" its search technology, and yet consumers are indifferent; they continue to switch to Google in droves.