The East Coast is bracing for the most powerful storm to hit its shores in decades.

Currently, Irene ranks in the “top 50 most intense hurricanes ever observed in the Atlantic basin,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Just how bad might the storm be? Here, seven things to expect:

View the full list here (via The Week)

Condoleezza Rice’s ‘candid’ memoir to shed light on Bush administration.

Rice’s second autobiography will take us ‘into secret negotiating rooms’ where global peace hung in the balance, publishers say.

Read the full story here (via The Guardian)

The US economy grew less than first estimated in the second quarter of 2011, revised figures have shown

The Commerce Department now says the economy expanded at an annualised rate of 1% between April and March, down from its first estimate of 1.3%. Read the rest of this article here. (via BBC)

The head of the US central bank, Ben Bernanke, is preparing to give a key speech that will be closely watched by markets for any hint of new stimulus

Last year, his speech paved the way for $600bn (£368bn) of quantitative easing – injecting cash into the financial system to try to boost the economy. Read the rest of this article here. (via BBC)

A second French publisher has reached a deal on digital books with Google to settle a copyright lawsuit

Such works account for the vast majority of the world’s books, and they are central to Google’s ambitions of creating a universal digital information repository. But its digitization project has prompted numerous lawsuits by publishers seeking to enforce their copyrights. Read the rest of this article here. (via New York Times)

The financial crisis has been good to Warren E. Buffett.

The billionaire investor snatched up shares of Goldman Sachs and General Electric during some of the darkest days of 2008, injecting life and funds into the companies and turning a handsome profit later. On Goldman alone, Mr. Buffett netted $1.7 billion. Read the rest of this article here. (via New York Times)

Billionaire Warren Buffett threw a lifeline to the Bank of America (BofA) on Thursday

“Bank of America is a strong, well-led company,” Buffett said in a statement released by BofA, the US’s largest bank in terms of deposits. Read the rest of this article here. (via Mail and Guardian)

United States (US) President Barack Obama admitted on Sunday that many Americans were not satisfied with his record on the economy

Obama’s approval rating on the struggling economy has dipped to 26% in a Gallup poll as fears grow of a slump into a second recession and global stock markets plunge, clouding his 2012 re-election prospects. Read the rest of this article here. (via Mail and Guardian)

United States technology company Apple is now worth as much as the 32 biggest eurozone banks

That’s the stark result from a steep fall in the share price of banks including Spain’s Santander, France’s BNP Paribas, Germany’s Deutsche Bank and Italy’s Unicredit, compared to a steady rise in Apple’s valuation, according to Thomson Reuters data. Read the rest of this article here. (via Mail and Guardian)

On the streets of New York, scruffy young creatives are tapping their inner Steven Tyler and strapping on leather cuffs, woven friendship bracelets and nylon cords — sometimes 5 or 10 each wrist — as part of their downtown uniform.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

If you are living in the U.S. or Western Europe and feeling pretty bad about the miserable state of the recovery, political paralysis, and growing unease about your country’s future, remember things could be worse. You could be in Japan.

Read the rest of this article here (via Time Magazine)

Former Vice President Dick Cheney writes in his new memoir that President George W. Bush rejected his advice in 2007 to bomb a suspected nuclear reactor site in Syria.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Cheney says he was “a lone voice” for military action against Syria. Other advisers were reluctant, Cheney says, because of “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” before the 2003 invasion of that country.

Read the rest of this article here (via The Huffington Post)

The party that led South Africa out of apartheid had by 2010 slipped into anti-democratic practices reminiscent of the regime it fought to overthrow

In the assessment of the Pretoria embassy cable, dated January 8, 2010, the ANC was following in the footsteps of the white-minority regime in its handling of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), a politically thorny protest movement by impoverished shack dwellers. Read the rest of this article here. (via iol)

The JSE All Share [JSE:J203] opened nearly 300 points in the black on Thursday as a three day advance in US stocks led to bargain hunting

Traders said they expect volatility to persist ahead of the central bankers’ summit in Jackson Hole on Friday. Read the rest of this article here. (via News24)

South African bonds were slightly weaker in midday trade on Thursday, with light local buying and international selling

“Bonds started on the backfoot taking their cue from US treasurys overnight but the market seems to have settled down a bit,” the trader said. Read the rest of this article here. (via News24)

Wheat fell in Chicago after three days of gains as Egypt, the world’s biggest importer of the grain, shunned U.S. and European Union crops

Egypt bought 180,000 metric tons of Russian milling wheat at a tender yesterday for prices from $284.17 to $290 a ton, said Nomani Nomani, vice chairman of the state-run General Authority for Supply Commodities. A ban on all cereal exports from Russia expired July 1 as scheduled. Read the rest of this article here. (via The Washington Post)

Government officials refer to it blandly as the “SSE,” or Sensitive Site Exploitation.

That’s their oblique term for the extraordinary cache of evidence that was carried away from Osama bin Laden’s compound the night the al-Qaeda leader was killed. With the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks a few weeks away, it’s possible to use this evidence to sketch a vivid portrait of al-Qaeda, drawing on material contained in more than 100 computer storage devices, including thumb drives, DVDs and CDs, and more than a dozen computers or hard drives — all collected during the May 2 raid.

Read the rest of this article here (via The Washington Post)

The White House is scrambling to fix its mensaje and timing problem with Latino voters as demonstrated Thursday by a significant immigration policy change.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that approximately 300,000 undocumented immigrants facing deportation will have their cases individually reviewed, and if classified “low priority” can apply for work permits and stay in the U.S. indefinitely.

Read the rest of this article here (via The Huffington Post)

Can Sheryl Sandberg upend Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture?
In 2007, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, knew that he needed help. His social-network site was growing fast, but, at the age of twenty-three, he felt  ill-equipped to run it. That December, he went to a Christmas party at the home  of Dan Rosensweig, a Silicon Valley executive, and as he approached the house he  saw someone who had been mentioned as a possible partner, Sheryl Sandberg,  Google’s thirty-eight-year-old vice-president for global online sales and  operations.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New Yorker)

Shares in Heineken have fallen after Europe’s top brewer warned demand for its beer in Europe and US markets will remain “challenging” this year

The firm revealed weaker-than-expected net profits of 605m euros ($872m; £529m) for the first half of the year. Read the rest of this article here. (via BBC)