Free Republic

The telecom giant is doing NSA-style work for law enforcement -without a warrant-and earning millions of dollars a year from taxpayers.

As the Federal Reserve's long-awaited December rate hike approaches, the parallels with a year ago are both striking and a bit worrying. The dollar is surging against other major currencies as the Fed gets set to tighten policy, even as other major central banks plan to keep their monetary spigots wide open for the foreseeable future. Similar circumstances triggered a bout of global financial market turmoil at the start of 2016... ...strong dollar is a negative for U.S. multinationals... ...good news is that Fed policymakers also are on guard against a repeat of the global financial market turmoil... ...IBD'S TAKE:...

Election 2016: Over the weekend, Donald Trump produced a 100-day plan of action worthy of an reformist presidential candidate. While there are good and bad items on his agenda, it would on balance be a boon to the economy. Too bad Trump didn't release it earlier. In his speech, delivered at the site of Lincoln's Gettysburg, Pa., address, Trump listed 28 actions he'd take either on his first day or during his first 100 days in office. calling it his "Contract With the American Voter." "It is a contract between myself and the American voter, and begins with restoring honesty,...

Pressure from the miners’ and energy workers’ union CGT forced the French government to back down on extending the carbon tax to coal-fired power stations. EurActiv’s partner Journal de l’Environnement reports.French governments have always struggled to tax emissions from coal. In 2009, François Fillon had to abandon the idea after his plans were struck down by the Constitutional Council. This time, the plan has been sunk by the country’s biggest union of miners and energy workers. On 25 April, President François Hollande announced the introduction of a minimum quota price for greenhouse gas emissions from combustion power stations. “This price...

âžž Company may announce around third-quarter earnings report âžž Twitter said to plan cut of about 8 percent of workforce Twitter Inc. is planning widespread job cuts, to be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The company may cut about 8 percent of the workforce, or about 300 people, the same percentage it did last year when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as chief executive officer, the people said. Planning for the cuts is still fluid and the number could change, they added. The people asked not to be identified talking about private...

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said at a conference this year in North Dakota that he'd end U.S. oil imports from OPEC if elected in November.

The ex-wife of disgraced Subway pitchman Jared Fogle filed a lawsuit Monday against the sandwich company, claiming it knew for years about Fogle’s desire for underage girls. Katie McLaughlin’s civil action, filed in Hamilton County, Indiana, said Subway received reports on three separate occasions — the first as early as 2004 — about Fogle’s sexual desire for young girls but did nothing to stop it. McLaughlin, who married Fogle in 2010, said the pitchman — who claimed to have lost hundreds of pounds by eating Subway sandwiches and walking — propositioned an underage girl for sex in 2004 at a...

Premiums will go up sharply next year under President Barack Obama’s health care law, and many consumers will be down to just one insurer, the administration confirmed Monday. That will stoke another “Obamacare” controversy days before a presidential election. Before taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less.

The Obama administration said Monday premiums for Obamacare will increase by an average of 25 percent next year. The Department of Health and Human Services said each of the 39 states currently served by the federally run online insurance exchanges will experience different price hikes. Three large insurers have decreased participation in the Obamacare marketplace, which will leave one in five consumers with only one insurance plan to chose from.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Pamela Buttery noticed something peculiar six years ago while practicing golf putting in her 57th-floor apartment at the luxurious Millennium Tower. The ball kept veering to the same corner of her living room. Those were the first signs for residents of the sleek, mirrored high-rise that something was wrong. The 58-story building has gained notoriety in recent weeks as the "leaning tower of San Francisco." But it's not just leaning. It's sinking, too. And engineers hired to assess the problem say it shows no immediate sign of stopping. "What concerns me most is the tilting," says...

The U.S.economy only needs to generate about 75,000 jobs — and possibly as few as 50,000 — each month to maintain a healthy labor market, according to a study released Monday by the San Francisco Fed. That’s down sharply from the 192,000 average payroll gains seen over the past three months. Because the economy is close to what the Fed calls “full employment,” the future is less about creating an even stronger labor market than about maintaining a healthy one, said San Francisco Fed President John Williams in a speech last week.

A powerful and Well made Video of Blacks expressing their Support for Trump. pass it on https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDliwn0Xjg

Discount brokerage Scottrade is being acquired by rival TD Ameritrade in a $4 billion deal. The companies announced the deal early Monday, following several weeks of news reports about the merger. The sale is subject to regulatory approvals, and is slated to close by Sept. 30, 2017. Scottrade will convert to TD Ameritrade systems in 2018. Combined, the two companies have $944 billion in total client assets and 10 million funded client accounts. "It gives us a lot of power to combine the two," Scottrade's founder and CEO Rodger Riney told the Post-Dispatch Monday. "It is a business that has...

Chinese firm admits its hacked DVRs, cameras were behind Friday's massive DDOS attack Botnets created from the Mirai malware were involved in Friday's cyber attack. Michael Kan - IDG News Oct 23, 2016 A Chinese electronics component manufacturer says its products inadvertently played a role in a massive cyberattack that disrupted major internet sites in the U.S. on Friday. Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, a vendor behind DVRs and internet-connected cameras, said on Sunday that security vulnerabilities involving weak default passwords in its products were partly to blame. According to security researchers, malware known as Mirai has been taking advantage of these vulnerabilities...

By year's end, Portland General Electric will fire up its 550-megawatt power plant in Boardman for a daylong test burn, feeding 8,000 tons of pulverized, roasted wood into its boilers instead of the usual diet of coal. The exercise is meant to gauge whether the aging fossil fuel plant could reliably generate electricity using renewable feedstock such as "torrefied" wood after its scheduled closure in 2020. If it works — technically, economically and environmentally — Oregon's only coal-fired power plant could one day become the country's largest biomass power plant. It's an uncertain, embryonic effort, but some believe the payoff...

US telecoms giant AT&T has announced that it will buy entertainment group Time Warner for nearly $86bn (£70bn). The deal - one of the biggest this year - still needs approval from regulators. If the takeover goes through, it would combine AT&T's distribution network with content from the Warner Brothers film studios and the cable TV channels HBO and CNN. AT&T's chairman described it as "a perfect match" but critics say it concentrates too much media power. 'Complementary strengths' The deal is likely to be closely scrutinised by US antitrust regulators. AT&T is already the third largest cable TV provider...

Confident in a Hillary Clinton victory, Washington’s foreign policy elite is readying plans for more warfare in Syria and more confrontations with nuclear-armed Russia, an across-the-spectrum “group think” that risks life on the planet ___ What is perhaps most alarming about this new “group think” is that there doesn’t appear to be any significant resistance to the expectation that President Hillary Clinton will unleash these neocon/liberal-hawk forces of intervention that President Barack Obama has somewhat restrained. Assuming Donald Trump’s defeat – increasingly seen as a foregone conclusion – the Republican leadership would mostly be in sync with Clinton if she...

Nick Carey

AND NOW... amidst billowing clouds of fragrant, aromatic first- and second-hand premium cigar smoke... it is time for... that harmless, lovable little fuzz ball, the highly-trained broadcast specialist, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, from behind the golden EIB microphone, firmly ensconced in the prestigious Attila-The-Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, serving humanity simply by showing up, and he’s not retiring until every American agrees with him — do NOT doubt him — with shrieks of joy at the mere mention of his name (that’s Rush, for those in Rio...

Though Republican candidate Donald Trump has used the term "inner-city" to exemplify poverty, "lost opportunity" and "hell," the reality is that majority of America's poor aren't in inner-cities. They live in the suburbs. "Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor residents in the suburbs of the nation's largest metropolitan areas grew by 64 percent — more than twice the growth rate in cities," the report found. "For the first time, suburbs became home to more poor residents than America's big cities. Today, one in three poor Americans — about 16.4 million people — lives in the suburbs." While there...