Obama-mania in Irish village for prodigal son's return

US President Barack Obama stepped back in time more than 160 years on Monday when he visited the tiny Irish village where his ancestor Falmouth Kearney was born.The most powerful man on the planet flew into Moneygall in the rural heart of Ireland, from where his great-great-great-grandfather had left to seek his fortune in the United States.Obama smiled broadly as he left the Marine One helicopter, which landed on the local Gaelic games field, while his wife Michelle held closed her trench coat against the wind.

WHY are pubs in London better than bars in New York, which are better than bars in Washington, DC? I've given a good deal of thought to this question recently, though the quality of said thought has been somewhat impaired by the very high quality of the pubs in London.

In a footnote to his paper on Irish famines, Edward J. O'Boyle writes:

At the Cock'n'Bull pub in the heart of Bondi, Irish tricolours were flying and the Guinness was flowing. A fiddler belted out a Celtic tune to revellers soaking up the atmosphere. Such was the happy crush that it seemed a substantial proportion of the tens of thousands of Irish people who have come to Australia to find work in the past year had found their way to the bar.

It is easy to forget just how much of a whopper Ireland’s bubble was. But my focus is on the post-crisis investment opportunities created in Ireland as a result. In short, I’m bullish on the Emerald Isle, and I have a way for you to invest there. First, I want to give you some memorable snapshots of how crazy things got at the heights of 2006…and also in the depths of November 2010.

15,000 light-years away from Earth, the universe is acting very strange. A new image of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae, shows a clusters of stars with some interesting properties: emitting X-rays and being super bright. They glimpsed the image with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, or VISTA telescope, the European Southern Observatory reported today.