North Korea and South Korea are currently meeting for military talks about the countries' sea border.

Borders, a seller of printed "books," is trying to trick America's youth into thinking that buying popular "books" about vampires is cooler than buying record albums of hip hop, for example. Yea right.

Last month, shares in the New York Times Co. dropped below the $4 cost of a Sunday paper, and shares in Citibank fell below the cost of the bank's ATM fee.

♦ Now comes the hard part. After winning the vote in the Senate last night, the bailout bill will head to the House for a Friday vote. [NYT, WSJ]
♦ John Thain will be staying put at Bank of America, contrary to initial rumors. He'll become the combined company's president of global banking, securities and wealth management. Who wants to hunt for a job in this economy? [MW]
♦ "Warren Buffett has become the new triple-A credit rating system." [NYT]
♦ Dick Fuld's last day in his corner office may come tomorrow. [WSJ]
♦ First-time applications for unemployment benefits rose to the highest level in seven years. [Bloomberg]

Hedge fund manager William Ackerman owns a 30 percent stake in Borders — but he doesn't want to anymore. The founder of Pershing Square Capital Management told reporters he thinks Amazon.com should purchase the bricks-and-mortar bookstore: "Amazon could buy the company for about $400 million to get those locations that would take more than $1.0bn to build." Not going to happen. Amazon just let Borders go as an online Web partner without much of a fight. (Photo by AP/Sancya)

Longtime Amazon.com partner Borders opened an independent storefront on the Web today. Analysts don't hold high expectations for the new Amazon rival and Borders Group Inc. president and CEO George Jones told the AP the company knows what's up its up against. "It's not the intent that we're going to out-Amazon Amazon at what they do," Jones said. So what is the intent behind Borders's store on the Web? Likely, Borders opened shop on the Web to help sell the company. Two months ago, Borders announced it was for sale and only last week, Barnes & Noble confirmed a team of its executives are looking into a deal.

Borders Bookstores will each soon contain two 37-inch TVs to expand advertising opportunities within the stores—just like Jack-in-the-Box! BordersTV, as the platform is called, won't be showing reality programming or soft-core porn, but it sort of feels like that—can no one stay in business selling books without also providing with each purchase lattes, WiFi, pedicures, escalators, plush toys and a backrub? We suspect the phrase "entertainment experience" was used in the making of this concept, which means we hate it by default. [NYT]

So Borders is having a contest for its 30,000 employees where they are encouraged to submit their manuscripts to their employer, which might then deign to make a book out of them! A "panel of judges at the corporate office" will award "a book deal including the full support of Borders merchandising and marketing arsenal" to the winning employee, according to today's press release. No mention, of course, of the money involved. But! "Our employees are talented and creative individuals who have a tremendous passion for books, and we believe that there are many who also have undiscovered writing talent," says Borders' executive VP for merchandising and marketing. Shelf-stocking slaves should note that they only have until January of 2008 to put (My Employer Is) Extremely Lame And Incredibly Condescending to bed.