My first conversation on Kindly – a new, anonymous chatting app where strangers can seek emotional support — didn’t go so well. I volunteered to be a listener and I was matched with a teenager from the United States. He or she (gender wasn’t revealed) told me their aunt — who they live with — was making sexual advances. “If I please her do you think she will let go of me?” The person asked me.

I stared at my phone slack-jawed. How to respond to a question like that? I’m not a therapist and I certainly don’t have professional training. It was possible the stranger I was chatting with was lying, spinning an elaborate ruse for fun, but I had no way of knowing. If their predicament was real, I was in no position to offer advice. It was the most memorable and worrisome experience I’ve had yet with a…

Mario Sergio Lima – Bloomberg, 9/23/2014

Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega defended today the use of the country’s sovereign fund to help meet fiscal targets in a year when Latin America’s biggest economy had its debt rating downgraded.

Brazil announced it will withdraw 3.5 billion reais ($1.45 billion) from the sovereign fund to cover spending. The primary surplus, which excludes interest payments, was 1.22 percent of gross domestic product in the year through July, compared with the 1.9 percent target.

“The sovereign fund is a primary savings account we created in 2008 and is perfectly usable,” Mantega told reporters today in Brasilia. “Nothing is more legitimate than using that fund to cover part of expenses.”

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Sending money isn’t as easy as sending an email, especially when it’s dealing with foreign banks — at least not yet. Two U.S. banks, New Jersey-based Cross River Bank and Kansas-based CBW Bank, are set to announce their use of the Ripple currency protocol, which would allow instant and free cross-border payments on the network.

“It’s a big milestone,” said Ripple Labs CEO, Chris Larsen. “We’ve been working on our enterprise banking strategy for well over a year. It takes awhile for banks to get going.”

The Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) is an internet protocol like HTTP or SMTP (which is what powers email) that allows a transfer of value across a distributed network. No one “owns” the World Wide Web or e-mail, and likewise, Ripple is an open-sourced protocol with no owner or operator. Because email is based on the SMTP protocol, you can send messages freely regardless of…