Free Republic

Two secret videos showing rapid deterioration in Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's health persuaded reluctant military and intelligence leaders to back the prisoner swap that has stoked a backlash, officials said Tuesday, as the Army launched a new probe into why the soldier disappeared from base shortly before his capture by the Taliban in 2009.

In light of leaked emails regarding the 2012 Benghazi attack, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry went head-to-head during Thursday’s press briefing. At one point, the press secretary took a jab at the reporter and his employer. After Henry questioned Carney over why the Ben Rhodes-authored emails focused on an anti-Islamic video rather than the terrorism aspect of the deadly siege, the press secretary remarked that the CIA-produced talking points at the time referred to protests at the Benghazi consulate as being inspired by similar demonstrations outside the American embassy in Cairo....

Maryland has given up on its Obamacare website, but not before spending $90 million of taxpayer funding on technology, according to a cost breakdown released Friday.Of the $90 million, exchange board Chairman Joshua Sharfstein said that the marketplace spent $55 million on the website itself, The Washington Post reports. Officials opted in late March, after six months of struggling with the inoperable system, to give up on fixing the website and start over again with a model of Connecticut’s more successful exchange website.Maryland’s Obamacare exchange received millions in federal taxpayer dollars to build its Affordable Care Act website and was...

With just days to go before open enrollment ends on March 31, Maryland officials are reportedly planning to abandon its glitch-ridden ObamaCare website and replace the health exchange with technology from Connecticut’s marketplace. The Washington Post reported late Friday that the board of the Maryland exchange will vote on changing the system that has cost at least $125.5 million at a meeting on Tuesday, the day after the end of the first enrollment period under ObamaCare. …

If you like your exchange … you can keep your exchange? And if you don‘t like your state ObamaCare exchange — because it hasn’t functioned properly in six months despite endless promises that Maryland would fix it — you don’t have to keep your exchange. The state will finally throw in the towel on its $125 million web portal, and will replace it with a copy of Connecticut’s: Maryland officials are set to replace the state’s online health-insurance exchange with technology from Connecticut’s insurance marketplace, according to two people familiar with the decision, an acknowledgment that a system that has...

The Tera Group Inc. said Monday it had finalized the terms for a multi-million dollar bitcoin swap agreement between two U.S. institutions, but declined to name the parties involved. Such transactions are currently unregulated, Tera said. The company said it has reached out to the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission in order to work on a regulated bitcoin swap. The CFTC hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of writing this post. “The goal is for us to bring this to the bitcoin community because there are many commercial entities that want to take bitcoin in but have concerns...

Cutting right to the chase: we don't think going short is a good idea yet. Just when you would think the situation with Mt. Gox couldn't get any stranger, it has. Apparently, the exchange "found" almost BTC 200,000 in one of its old wallets this month. The coins would be currently worth approximately $115 million. A statement published yesterday on the exchanges website reads: MtGox Co., Ltd. had certain old-format wallets which were used in the past and which, MtGox thought, no longer held any bitcoins. Following the application for commencement of a civil rehabilitation proceeding, these wallets were rescanned...

Notoriously tight-lipped bitcoin exchange and CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index member BTC-e is now allowing customers to withdraw funds to Visa and MasterCard debit and credit cards, with some exceptions. The company blog post, issued on 21st March, indicated that the new program is now available to customers in any country, using any currency. All customers will pay a 5% fee for the service. The new functionality is noteworthy as it will allow customers to send money to debit and credit cards issued by two of the largest and most commonly used international card issuers. At present, the transfer of funds...

A new report suggests that Mt. Gox, the now-bankrupt Japan-based exchange said to have lost 850,000 BTC in customer funds may actually still be in possession of 200,000 BTC ($118m at press time). The news, published by Yahoo Japan, allegedly comes from the exchange’s bankruptcy lawyer who suggests the bitcoins were found on 7th March in a wallet used by Mt. Gox prior to June 2011. The 200,000 bitcoins would equate to just over 23% of the entirety of the funds presumed lost by the company in the wake of widespread theft that is said to have occurred on the...

A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday temporarily froze the U.S. assets of Mt. Gox chief Mark Karpeles and allowed alleged victims of the shuttered bitcoin exchange to demand evidence of what they claim is a massive fraud. The market for the digital currency was rocked last month when Mt. Gox, once the world's largest bitcoin exchange, ceased operations, and soon after filed for bankruptcy. Mt. Gox said it may have lost 750,000 bitcoins, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in a hacking attack. The freeze on Karpeles' assets, issued by Judge Gary Feinerman in Chicago, also applies to Mt. Gox's...

New York’s Superintendent of Financial Services, Benjamin M. Lawsky, has issued a public order that confirms the state is now accepting applications for digital currency exchanges. Perhaps most notably, however, was that Lawsky indicated that these businesses will be regulated under new New York regulation, which he committed to having in place by the end of the second quarter of 2014. In his remarks, Lawsky struck his usual balance of at once recognizing the promise of digital currencies and stressing that related business activities need to be conducted in a responsible and lawful manner.

The list of state ObamaCare exchange "successes" expands. Earlier today, word was the feds were looking into Maryland. Also, Oregon is in even worse shape than Maryland, despite spending $300 million. THREE HUNDRED MILLION. The state had its chance to audit and apparently just pretended to. That staggering figure and correspondingly staggering failure has even the state’s ObamaCare-supporting senators asking for an investigation: Congress’s investigative arm said Wednesday it will audit Oregon’s broken healthcare exchange site, which has yet to enroll even one person despite spending $304 million in federal funds.The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a letter to...

The Health and Human Services inspector general (IG) will launch an investigation into the failed ObamaCare exchange in Maryland, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) announced Monday. “Maryland officials ignored early warning signs and chose to waste and abuse federal taxpayer money by opening up what they knew was a flawed exchange to the public,” he wrote in a statement. “I have confidence that the nonpartisan and independent HHS Inspector General will thoroughly investigate and bring to light how hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on one of the worst exchange roll outs in the country,” he added. An official with...

U.S. and Japanese regulators are investigating the collapse of the world's largest exchange for trading bitcoins, the virtual currency that has grown in popularity among technophiles for buying products and services online. The separate investigations were launched Wednesday as supporters of the virtual currency insisted that the shutdown of Mt. Gox was only a temporary setback for the novel monetary system. The failure of the Tokyo exchange, which may have included the theft of almost 750,000 bitcoins worth more than $300 million, was seen by critics as derailing prospects for the virtual currency. But several high-profile bitcoin investors came forward...

UPDATE (14th February, 11:38 GMT): Bitcoin exchange BTC-e has confirmed it is processing bitcoin withdrawals. ——————————- Bitstamp has revealed it plans to start processing its customers’ bitcoin withdrawals again later today. The exchange halted bitcoin withdrawals earlier this week after it was discovered a bot had launched a massive DDoS attack on a number of bitcoin exchanges

Influential members of Congress have asked its investigative arm to probe the beleaguered Cover Oregon health insurance exchange, Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., announced Thursday in Medford. Walden joined with Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy (R-Penn), Health Subcommittee Chairman Joe Pitts (R-Penn), and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich) to sign a Feb. 12 letter requesting an investigation to Gene Dodaro, the U.S. Comptroller General who oversees the Government Accountability Office.

Cost Curve: A little-noticed problem is fast emerging in states that decided to set up their own ObamaCare exchanges. Many of them face financial crises once the federal grant money runs out. After taking nearly $4 billion in federal grants to set up and run their exchanges this year, 14 states and the District of Columbia are supposed to be self-sufficient by next year. At least that's what the ObamaCare statute says (which these days doesn't mean much). But from the looks of it, many are heading into a fiscal brick wall.

MADRID (MarketWatch) -- Bitcoin prices fell on Friday after exchange Mt. Gox said it was halting withdrawals temporarily. The company said an increase in flow of withdrawals requests "has hindered our efforts on a technical level. To understand the issue thoroughly, the system needs to be in a static state," said Mt. Gox officials in a note on the website Friday. To resolve the issue, it said a temporarily pause on all withdrawal requests was needed. Its tech team was working on its system, Mt. Gox added, and an update will be provided by Monday.

Minnesota isn't alone in wasting federal dollars on failing exchanges. ObamaCare exchanges built by Oregon, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Vermont also are suffering serious-to-fatal problems. These six states — all solidly Democratic — received $1.2 billion in ObamaCare grants, according to official tallies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Those dysfunctional six are in addition to 35 states that initially accepted funds to build exchanges that never got built.

While limping along in the short-run with its troubled website, MNsure must quickly pick a strategy for making long-term software fixes and get beyond the recent "crisis mode" that has dominated program management, according to a consultant's report released Wednesday. Some improvements can be made in the coming weeks, but the website can't be completely fixed by the March 31 deadline for people to obtain health insurance, according to a report from Optum, a unit of Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group. The company recommended doubling the call center workforce with the equivalent of 100 full-time workers, and utilizing an Optum call center...