The! Biggest! News! of! the! Day! - Not BHP Gold Find, iTunes and Apple, a GM Strike or Commodity Boom

Here are some of the contenders for today's biggest...news...of...the...day...

• A "massive" gold strike for BHP Billiton (BHP)...
• A promotion at Starbucks (SBUX) where the company will give away song cards that can be redeemed at Apple's (AAPL) iTunes store...
• A deadline for a strike at General Motors (GM) by the United Auto Workers union set for 11 AM today...
• A move by Dell (DELL) to sell PCs in China...
• A "give 1 get 1" program for laptops that allows someone to give computers to schoolchildren in underdeveloped nations...
• A look into the commodities boom where it is said "the days of $50 or $60 a barrel oil may be gone now"...

While those are all stories worth watching, I think it is obviously clear that the biggest story, courtesy of my colleague Richard Sparks, is this - Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on...according to the article, "About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary"...

I for one will not let this oh-so-egregious-injustice-to-our-language-hatred-against-hyphens stand. Com'on everyone, do your part - hyphenate!!!

Yeah - it really is a slow news day...it was either that or this suggestion from Mark Fightmaster - Monkeys mug tourist, take phone at zoo - where "A visitor to Fuzhou Zoo had his phone stolen and his arm scratched after he took photos of a group of Assamese macaques"...