Remember when then-analyst Henry Blodget said in 1998 that Amazon (AMZN) shares would shoot to $400? And Wall Street laughed but began pouring money into the stock, making a boatload for founder Jeff Bezos?

Well, Bezos and Blodget (pictured) are back, though on a much smaller scale. The Amazon CEO is leading a round of $5 million in venture funding for Business Insider, Blodget's business news site. Bezos is investing personally, and not using Amazon cash, through his investment arm Bezos Expeditions, Bloomberg reported.

Other investors in the round include RRE Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners.

There appear to be no issues with Bezos investing in a site that gives considerable coverage to Amazon. 

The very rich are a lot like the rest of us when it comes to losing a job: They receive unemployment benefits, just the same as a millworker or office assistant. 

What's startling about the trend is that the number of millionaires receiving unemployment benefits has skyrocketed, with nearly 3,200 households earning adjusted gross income of more than $1 million receiving jobless payments in 2010, according to Bloomberg.

That means the government shelled out $29.9 million in jobless benefits to million-dollar earners in 2010, according to Bloomberg, citing IRS data compiled by the media company (2010 is the latest year for which this data is available). 

 

In the U.K., a teetotaling study declared that extended pub hours make more workers show up late for work or not show up at all. Meanwhile, at 3:56 a.m. in New York City, a grizzled barfly muttered the word "amateurs" before ordering a nightcap and putting the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" on the jukebox.

The study's authors at Lancaster University insist that when the U.K. changed its nationwide pub closing time from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. -- and eventually to 24 hours a day – more workers began showing up for work late or calling out "sick." Towns that maintained the old closing times apparently didn't see such problems.

Prime Minister David Cameron hasn't exactly been thrilled with the country's reputation as a pub-crawling, football-song-slurri​ng rabble.

 

If federal workers being furloughed for days doesn't make the sequester seem real enough for you, maybe getting turned away at a cancer clinic will help the mandatory round of tax hikes and spending cuts sink in.

According to The Washington Post's Wonkblog, cancer clinics across the country are turning away thousands of patients after cuts that went into effect on April 1 made administering expensive chemotherapy drugs too costly for many facilities to sustain. Clinics are funneling patients to already busy hospitals while saying that continuing the status quo would bankrupt them in six months to a year.

The cuts are particularly troublesome for Medicare patients, roughly a third of whom are losing their treatments as a result. Lawmakers tried to limit the impact on Medicare patients by keeping cuts to the program at 2%. Unfortunately for cancer patients, that 2% is falling almost squarely on the portion of the program that doles out their drugs.

 

In Ireland, the U.K. and elsewhere, beer and hard cider coexist peacefully on adjacent taps at the local pub as equals. Hard cider hasn't quite earned that respect in the U.S., but it's coming.

The Craft Brew Alliance (BREW), which produces Widmer Brothers, Redhook and Kona beers, announced the launch of its Square Mile Cider Company brand on Tuesday, and it says original and Spur and Vine varieties should be available on the West Coast starting in May.

That in itself isn't such a big deal. But added to Samuel Adams producer Boston Beer's (SAM) jump into the cider industry, Anheuser-Busch InBev's (BUD) cider experiments and a recent spate of cider company buyouts, these are big moves by brewers to get a small piece of a growing segment.

 

The burger is no longer the undisputed king of the fast food world.

According to the website BurgerBusiness, market researcher Mintel has found more chicken sandwiches than burgers on the menus of quick-service restaurants since beef prices shot up in 2010.

As of 2012, chicken held a slim 330 to 323 lead. Burgers have regained some ground from 2011, when their numbers stood at 314. Chicken, though, is hardly on the ropes, with many consumers eating less red meat for health reasons.

"Consider the barrage of new menu items introduced by Burger King (BKW) in January," the site says. "Yes, it included an Avocado Swiss Whopper, but the wave also brought Philly Original Chicken and Italian Original Chicken sandwiches, as well as the introduction of new Chicken Nuggets." 

Facebook (FB) didn't announce its own phone Thursday. It didn't make a new operating system. Instead, the company has created essentially an app on steroids that gives Facebook prime real estate on Android devices.

 

Facebook messages and chats are right there on your home screen. You won't have to go into a Facebook app anymore to see them. The platform works on top of the Android mobile operating system from Google (GOOG) and will start showing up pre-installed on devices from HTC and Samsung.

 

Oh, and there will be ads, too.

 

Art and money often go hand-in-hand, especially in the high-priced realm of auction houses. But that marriage of art and commerce can get controversial when the artwork in question is of a religious nature -- and the faith involved takes issue with what it considers its sacred, priceless objects being put up for sale.

That's the international scenario unfolding as the Hopis of Arizona and their supporters call on the U.S. government to stop a planned auction in Paris next week. Reports say the auction of 70 Hopi artifacts at the Néret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou auction house, one of the largest-ever auctions of its kind, could bring in up to $1 million.

Hopis view the objects known as katsinas, or “friends,” as being imbued with living, divine spirits -- for use in many of their rituals and ceremonies.