AFP:

US debt shot up $238 billion to reach 100 percent of gross domestic project after the government’s debt ceiling was lifted, Treasury figures showed Wednesday.

Treasury borrowing jumped Tuesday, the data showed, immediately after President Barack Obama signed into law an increase in the debt ceiling as the country’s spending commitments reached a breaking point and it threatened to default on its debt.

The new borrowing took total public debt to $14.58 trillion, over end-2010 GDP of $14.53 trillion, and putting it in a league with highly indebted countries like Italy and Belgium.

The Hamburg data protection authority on Tuesday ruled that Facebook’s facial recognition feature, which attempts to identify people in photos uploaded to the site, violates German privacy laws.

Johannes Caspar, the head of the authority, said Facebook should not be collecting users’ biometric data – such as their face shape and the distance between their eyes – without getting their explicit consent. He has demanded that the social networking site change or disable the feature. All data collected so far should be deleted.

Mr Caspar has given Facebook two weeks to respond. If the company is unable to make changes, Mr Caspar said the Hamburg authority would consider bringing legal action against it. The German courts can impose fines of up to €300,000 ($426,397) for privacy breaches.

Alan Taylor:

Earlier this year, David Guttenfelder, chief Asia photographer for the Associated Press, along with Jean H. Lee, AP bureau chief in Seoul, were granted unprecedented access to parts of North Korea as part of the AP’s efforts to expand coverage of the isolated communist nation. The pair made visits to familiar sites accompanied by government minders, and were also allowed to travel into the countryside accompanied by North Korean journalists instead of government officials. Though much of what the AP journalists saw was certainly orchestrated, their access was still remarkable. Collected here are some of Guttenfelder’s images from the trip that provide a glimpse of North Korea. [37 photos]

Stu Woo:

SEATTLE—Amazon.com Inc., the world’s largest online retailer, hasn’t charged sales tax in most states since its founding in 1994. And it has taken some extreme measures to keep it that way.

Among them: Staff traveling around the U.S. have been required to first consult a company map that shades each state red, yellow or green, said three people who have worked for the retailer. These people said they needed permission from managers or company lawyers before entering “red” states because a worker’s actions might trigger laws that force Amazon to collect taxes in those states.

Helen Pidd:

He is one of the most paradoxical and notorious figures in modern German history: a social democrat lawyer turned leftwing terrorist who went to prison, turned to Maoism and then came out as a far-right nationalist.

Now there is another twist: Horst Mahler, a founding member of the Red Army Faction, was also a Stasi informant.

According to German newspaper reports, the revelation comes from a leaked report by state prosecutors re-investigating the shooting of a pacifist by a Berlin policeman during a 1967 protest.

Paul Krugman:

So what’s the truth? I’ve written about this before, but here’s another take.

The fact is that federal spending rose from 19.6% of GDP in fiscal 2007 to 23.8% of GDP in fiscal 2010. So isn’t that a huge spending spree? Well, no.

First of all, the size of a ratio depends on the denominator as well as the numerator. GDP has fallen sharply relative to the economy’s potential; here’s the ratio of real GDP to the CBO’s estimate of potential GDP:

Ira Stoll:

Five under-appreciated points about the federal budget and debt ceiling:

1. Whenever I need to get my bearings in the debate over the debt, the deficit, or the debt ceiling, I go to the web site of the White House Office of Management and Budget and download historical table 1.3. The story it tells, in very round numbers, is as simple as 2, 3, 4. The federal government spent about $2 trillion in 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration. It spent about $3 trillion in 2008, at the end of the Bush administration. And it is going to spend about $4 trillion in 2011, three years into the Obama administration.

You can fool around with inflation and with the percentage of GDP and with the revenue side of the equation, but the bottom line is that the federal government is spending about double what it was at the end of the Clinton administration. For all the clamor on the left to bring back the Clinton-era top tax rates, there are few, if any, politicians in Washington talking about bringing back the Clinton-era spending levels.

Megan McCardle:

A Few More Charts That Should Accompany All Debt Ceiling Discussions

This chart from the White House, which purports to prove, with the scientific magic of math, that basically everything bad that has happened to the budget is the fault of one George W. Bush, has been making the rounds. My colleague approvingly calls it “Another chart that should accompany all debt ceiling discussions”.

I’m a little less enamored, considering that this graph attributes decisions made by Obama and an all-Democratic Congress–like doubling down in Afghanistan–to Bush, while taking responsibility for basically nothing except the stimulus. When Obama extends the Bush tax cuts for the rich under pressure from Congressional Republicans, that disappears from his side of the ledger, because after all, he didn’t want to do it. When Bush enacts Medicare Part D under pressure from Congressional Democrats, the full cost is charged against his presidency. The list of such silliness goes on. Our president seems set to coin another presidential motto: “The duck starts here.”

American City Business Journals:

Six-hundred billion of the $1.24 trillion held by U.S. businesses is in overseas accounts, a matter of debate in Washington over offering tax breaks to encourage repatriation of the money.

Moody’s said the cash stash grew even though the amount spent on capital improvements, mergers and acquisitions and dividends increased.

Moody’s also said that the U.S. corporate debt-to-cash ratio was the lowest in the last five years at 3.06.

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

Is the government using cellular data to track Americans as they move around the U.S.?

According to the general counsel of the National Security Agency, it may have that authority. Matthew Olsen, who is currently at the NSA and has been nominated to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, discussed the possibility at a confirmation hearing Tuesday morning in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist,” he said. His comments came after Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) asked him several times whether the government has the authority to “use cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.”

Although Olsen acknowledged the possibility, he also said “it is a very complicated question” and that the intelligence community is working on a memo that will provide a better answer for the committee.

Alan Rappeport:

General Mills hit out at ethanol subsidies as a driver of rising food prices in the US, arguing that they needlessly fuel inflation.

“We’re driving up food prices unnecessarily,” Ken Powell, chief executive of General Mills, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If corn prices go up, wheat goes up. It’s all linked.”

General Mills, which makes Cheerios cereal, Progresso soup and Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, is the world’s sixth-largest food company by revenues. It said last month that it expects its input costs to increase up to 11 per cent next year as it lowered its earnings forecast on inflation fears.

John Gravois:

One sweltering day last spring, out of curiosity and a long-standing interest in the old-fashioned American institutions of civic engagement, I stepped out of my apartment building in the nation’s capital and walked over to attend a nearby conference of the Toastmasters. Founded in a Southern California YMCA basement for the betterment of tongue-tied young men, the Toastmasters have been offering “practice and training in the art of public speaking” along with “sociability and good fellowship” since the mid-1920s. In my mind, the group harked back to a half-imagined America of bowling leagues, church barbecues, and Rotary signs on the edge of town. What was funny was that my apartment resided in a sandy, congested neighborhood of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Under the Arabian midday glare, I scurried across one of the city’s sprawling six-lane boulevards—past a billboard that months earlier had advertised the local Krispy Kreme’s “Ramadan Dozen” special—to reach the campus of a local women’s college that was hosting the event. When I arrived at the main auditorium, I found it humming with a 300-horsepower murmur. The place was packed with men and women in off-the-rack power suits, plus a few starched white robes and black abayas. The room was decked end-to-end with gold silk banners, each, to my amazement, representing a different local chapter of the Toastmasters. By itself, Abu Dhabi—a young boomtown of global migrants roughly the size of Milwaukee—harbors seventeen active chapters of the group, I learned. The UAE as a whole, with a population of about eight million people, has seventy-one chapters.