TommieMedia

Imagine you are at a computer working on your next big research project. You go to Google Books, type in a keyword and within seconds you have your pick of books from top library collections around the nation. In a few years, this will be a reality.

Intent on showing firm command of a deepening Gulf Coast environmental crisis, President Barack Obama kneeled on a Lousiana beach Friday and lamented the livelihoods and wildlife imperiled by America’s largest-ever oil spill. He flew to the Gulf Coast amid a rising crescendo of criticism as crude continued to spew into nature after an oil rig exploded and sank April 20.

In Facebook’s vision of the Web, you would no longer be alone and anonymous. Sites would reflect your tastes and interests – as you expressed them on the social network – and you wouldn’t have to fish around for news and songs that interest you.

Standing in the way is growing concern about privacy from Facebook users.

SEATTLE — Apple has surpassed Microsoft as the largest technology company in the world by market capitalization.

Apple’s move comes as the company’s iPhone, and now its iPad tablet computer, take on more of the personal computing tasks once handled by computers running Microsoft programs.

Space shuttle Atlantis is about to wrap up its flying career. Atlantis and its six-man crew are scheduled to land Wednesday morning in Florida and end NASA’s third-to-last shuttle flight. Mission Control says rain could interfere, however, and keep the shuttle in orbit an extra day.

Alcohol is illegal in Saudi Arabia, so for those who suffer from alcohol and drug abuse, treatment is scarce and the stigma so great that most never talk about their addiction, even to close family members. Mohammed Al-Turaiki, the chief executive of the Saudi Care for Rehabilitation and Health Care in Riyadh, is trying to change the negative image of addiction by creating a network of treatment facilities in the oil-rich kingdom. He came to Brighton Hospital in Detroit to check out the facility and its treatment programs that have long have included the  region’s large Arab and Muslim population.

A former Minnesota nurse accused of going online and encouraging depressed people to kill themselves was ordered to stay off the Internet while his criminal case is pending. A judge on Tuesday also forbade William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, of Faribault, from leaving the state except for work assignments as a long-haul trucker, the career he took up after being stripped of his nursing license.

Graduates and their families lined up Saturday to take free shuttles from the Anderson parking ramp to the Metrodome where the 2010 undergraduate spring commencement ceremony was held. The line for the shuttles wrapped around the first two levels of the parking ramp.

At the St. Thomas commencement ceremony Saturday, 75-year-old James Garber will receive his long-awaited diploma.

A proposal has been pulled for a six-story mixed residential and commercial building on the corner of Grand and Cleveland avenues after the plans for the building were met with opposition from neighborhood residents.