You all know now that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was rapidly picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap yesterday) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story. This story highlights the unhealthy importance of Google on world economy. Google's action (intentional or not) can be directly attributed to over 300 million dollar loss by United and a loss of face. Should Google be sued for this mistake?

"In India, fears about the experiment spread rapidly through the media" - Reuters & quoted verbatim by MSNBC "But in deeply religious and superstitious India..." - Reuters & quoted verbatim by MSNBC What kind of stupid yellow journalism is this? Who gave Reuters the right to categorize and denigrate a whole country based on its incorrect and biased views? As an Indian, I deeply resent this piece of yellow journalism from Reuters. Yellow journalism, in short, is biased opinion masquerading as objective fact. Moreover, the practice of yellow journalism involved sensationalism, distorted stories, and misleading images for the sole purpose of boosting newspaper sales and exciting public opinion. It was particularly indicative of two papers founded and popularized in the late 19th century Yellow journalism is journalism that downplays legitimate news in favor of eye-catching headlines that sell more newspapers. It may feature exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, sensationalism, or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or journalists. The job of a journalist is to report facts and only facts. The facts in this case was that a simple village girl was mislead by media (yellow journalism) into believing that the world was coming to an end. The media incorrectly highlighted speculations by some doomsayers without highlighting the negation of their views by reputed scientists. As a result a poor young women decided to end her life. So yellow journalism by Indian press took one life in Bhopal and yellow journalism by Reuters managed to denigrate the whole country by telling the world that India as a whole is a "deeply superstitious" country! Bravo Reuters!