* The U.S. will have budget deficits for at least the next decade or so. For 2010, the deficit will be the equivalent of about 11 percent of the nation's economic output. The last times the deficit was that large were during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II--"with the expectation that [the deficits] would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated." (The New York Times)
* In Madhya Pradesh, India, a bandit-ridden region in the center of the country, local officials developed a program that makes this offer to male members of the machismo-priding culture: get a vasectomy, receive a gun license. Just months after the plan was introduced in 2008, nearly 200 men had agreed to the deal. Said Manish Shrivastav, administrative chief of Shivpuri and originator of the plan: "This is a state with a high number of dacoits [bandits] who like to keep rifles. It also has a low level of vasectomies because of a perceived notion of manliness. I decided to match that with a bigger symbol of manliness--a gun license. It has been a success."
* Toyota, which recently recalled millions of cars all over the world due to problems with accelerators, received around 2,000 complaints and had been hearing of problems since 2002. It finally stepped up its investigation into the problem in August after the death of an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer, who died in a crash with his wife, daughter, and brother-in-law, after their car would not stop.
* The Obama administration is seeking to overhaul the Bush-era "No Child Left Behind" Act and its 2014 deadline for under-performing schools. Most of the parts of the act that the administration plans to do away with are ones that educators had protested the most. However, the plan also includes changing the formulas used to distribute federal funds to schools--funds would be allocated based on academic progress, instead of according to the number of students; the old formula based on student population has been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process for the nation's 14,000 school districts for years.
* There are thought to be 37,964 planets in the galaxy hospitable enough to support life as intelligent as humans.