So far, the performance of many of the listed Chinese banks, natural-resources companies and other big firms under state control has been stellar over time.

WSJ: Outgoing Hong Kong Securities Regulator Head: 'China Is the New Dot-Com'

Rooms are dedicated to SUNY Buffalo's English department (its stellar faculty at the time included critic Leslie Fiedler, novelist John Barth and poet Robert Creeley) and to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, then under the dynamic leadership of conductors Lukas Foss and Michael Tilson Thomas.

WSJ: Wish You Were Here | Albright-Knox | They Shuffled Off to Buffalo | By Richard B. Woodward

LinkedIn has taken its time to achieve stellar status but as comScore pointed out this week the business network site reached the number 2 spot for social networks in the USA in June (as measured by unique visitors), overtaking former social network darling, MySpace.

FORBES: Why LinkedIn Deserves to be The Number 1 Social Network

The company said its Warner Bros film studios had had a slightly less stellar quarter and confirmed a costly overhaul of the struggling Time Magazine.

BBC: Time Warner profits boosted by rise in TV fees

Rather, they're created inside stellar cores, implying that gas giants had a hard time forming until multiple generations of stars had been born, died and spread their innards throughout the cosmos in massive supernova explosions.

MSN: Alien Earths may be plentiful in our Milky Way galaxy

For the first time, researchers are looking at the world through the eyes of Stellar sea lions to see if they can reverse the decline of these magnificent creatures.

BBC: Sea lion test to probe declines

Perhaps it's time for Lulu to drop a name that we both associate with less than stellar behavior.

CNN: Is it OK to change a dog's name?

He had been pouring out the operas, assembling stellar casts of singers from all over Europe and laying on sumptuous productions, but as time went by the expense of mounting full-blown operas and the public's waning appetite for the Italian variety pitched him into financial crisis.

ECONOMIST: Handel's anniversary

For those who've yet to give it a whirl, Babbel uses a mix of repetition, visual cues, spelling exercises and voice recognition, and it does a pretty stellar job of segmenting things into digestible lessons for those who only have five or ten minutes at a time to spare.

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