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Paddy Power has drastically shortened the odds on a meeting between humans and extraterrestrials in the current decade. They say the chances of an alien discovery this year have risen dramatically. They are offering odds as short as 20/1 (in from 200/1 before the Pentagon announcement), while their presence could be confirmed before the month’s end (50/1 – in from 500/1 yesterday). They’re assuming that the people from the stars come in peace, although you can get odds of 500/1 for an all-out war between humans and aliens to take place by the year 2030. The company is nevertheless offering...

The odds of Hillary Clinton reaching the White House lengthened overnight, after an apparent fainting spell while watching Sept. 11 ceremonies forced her party’s hand in revealing that the former secretary of state is suffering from pneumonia. Irish bookmaker Paddy Power dropped its odds on Donald Trump from 6/4 to 2/1, giving the billionaire mogul a 33 percent chance of becoming next president of the United States. Clinton’s recent coughing attacks and previous stumbles have created a vast number of rumors on potential underlying causes, which has also improved the chances of two rank outsiders. Former rival and Democrat runner-up...

While Hillary Clinton remained the favorite to be elected president in November, the odds of Donald Trump winning the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.  have increased, according to European betting houses. London-based William Hill, whose name adorns the sports book at Monmouth Park in Oceanport, and Dublin-based Paddy Power both set Clinton's current odds to win at 8 to 15, giving her a 65 percent chance of becoming the first female U.S. president. Trump's odds at both bookmakers were 6 to 4, giving him a 40 percent chance of winning the White House. When he first began his presidential campaign, betting houses were offering...

Man sentenced to 3 years for holding up bookies with cucumber hidden in sock Gary Rough claims he was 'only joking' when he tried to rob the Ladbrokes in Glasgow, England, with a cucumber hidden inside a sock, which he tried to play off as a sawed-off shotgun. Rough was given 40 months jail time for the incident. A British robber has been jailed for holding up bookies with a cucumber. Gary Rough, 28, stuffed the lengthy vegetable into a black sock to try and make it look like a sawed-off shotgun. He then demanded cash from terrified staff at...

Just hours after Pope Benedict XVI‘s surprising Feb. 28 resignation, bookmakers have already started placing odds on his successor. Quickest off the mark was the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power, which has already gone through three favorites for the position, starting off with Nigerian Francis Arinze, before shifting to Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson and then to Canadian Marc Ouellet — who at the time of this writing is the most favored option, with odds of 11 to 4. A rival bookie, Ladbrokes, currently has Turkson as the slight favorite at 3 to 1, followed by Arinze (7 to 2) and then...

Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The smart money thinks there's a better chance today than yesterday that John McCain will dump Sarah Palin as his running mate. Before the Republican senator's presidential campaign disclosed the pregnancy of Palin's 17-year-old daughter, bookmakers in Britain and Ireland were offering 20-1 odds or higher on a bet that she would be forced off the ticket, meaning a 1 pound ($1.78) bet would pay 20 pounds. Now that same bet will pay no more than 8 pounds. ``While it is rare that a VP candidate gets dropped, it's not completely impossible,'' said Ken Robertson, political...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Presidential_04/RCP_Markets.html

MOSCOW (AP) _ Russian police have broken up a hacker ring that extorted money from British bookmakers, inflicting millions in losses on their Web sites in a series of attacks that attracted the British government's attention, officials said Wednesday. The suspects flooded online betting sites with false requests for information in so-called "denial of service" attacks. They would then send e-mails demanding money for stopping the attacks, said Yevgeny Yakimovich, the chief of the Russian Interior Ministry's Department K for fighting cyber-crimes. Yakimovich said the gang had caused about 40 million pounds (over US$70 million) in damages to British bookmakers....