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#1 On Wednesday, the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal were all taken down by unexpected “technical glitches“. Authorities are assuring us that hackers were not responsible for any of this. #2 In China, a full-blown stock market crash is unfolding. The Shanghai Composite Index has plummeted more than 30 percent in less than a month, and the Chinese version of the NASDAQ has dropped by more than 40 percent. The amount of “paper wealth” that has been lost in China is 15 times greater than the GDP of Greece. #3 Just the other day,...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The man who led the Internal Revenue Service when it was giving extra scrutiny to tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status told Congress on Tuesday that he knew little about what was happening while he was still commissioner. Douglas Shulman, who vacated his position last November when his five-year term expired, told the Senate Finance Committee he didn't learn all the facts until he read last week's report by a Treasury inspector general confirming the targeting strategy. In his first public remarks since the story broke, Shulman said: "I agree this is an issue...

Thursday night's terror scare on a Delta Airlines flight from New York to Madrid began when an air marshal became suspicious of a passenger of Pakistani descent who had just left a lavatory, and ended with a heavily armed SWAT team storming the plane, only to find no terrorist and no bomb. It was another false alarm in the air that had some in law enforcement questioning the judgment of federal air marshals. And over the new two weeks, prior to and during the London Olympics, there will be teams of marshals on virtually every U.S. carrier flight into or...

With the announcement of Elena Kagan as nominee for the open seat on the Supreme Court, comments both sound and foolish are sure to flood the media. In the prior category is the observation that Ms. Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar with a superb record of service in the federal government and as a law school dean. In the foolish category, we are already hearing a replay of an attack critics used against her when she was being considered for her current position as solicitor general. That attack goes something like this: During her time as dean of Harvard...

I was in the shower....

Whatever happened to ... the Sars pandemic? Iain Hollingshead Saturday February 25, 2006 The Guardian (UK) It has all been bird flu this week, but it is not so long since the spectre of a Sars pandemic was hogging the headlines. Severe acute respiratory syndrome is a pneumonia-like coronavirus that first emerged in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in November 2002. Eight months later, the international spread of Sars-CoV had resulted in 8,098 cases and 774 deaths in 26 countries. "Surviving is even worse than dying," said one sufferer in Hong Kong. Many victims were left with debilitating bone...

Dear Friends, As most of you have probably heard, I was arrested before the State of the Union Address tonight. I am speechless with fury at what happened and with grief over what we have lost in our country. There have been lies from the police and distortions by the press. (Shocker) So this is what really happened: This afternoon at the People's State of the Union Address in DC where I was joined by Congresspersons Lynn Woolsey and John Conyers, Ann Wright, Malik Rahim and John Cavanagh. Lynn brought me a ticket to the State of the Union Address....

Late in 2003, nearly a year after the pension board had entered into a deal with the city to avoid fully funding the retirement system, pension administrator Lawrence Grissom offered a candid evaluation in an e-mail message. " . . . Bad things began to happen . . . greed happened," he wrote to an attorney of the circumstances surrounding the city's 2002 plan, which was linked to increases in employee benefits. The agreement helped the city stave off the prospect of having to make a multimillion-dollar payment – anywhere from $25 million to more than $500 million – to...

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics: 1. For no reason...

What happened to the rare tribes? SANJAY DUTTA & CHANDRIKA MAGO TUESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2004 11:19:06 PM NEW DELHI: An enormous anthropological disaster is in the making. The killer tsunami is feared to have wiped out entire tribes — already threatened by their precariously small numbers — perhaps rendering them extinct and snapping the slender tie with a lost generation. Officials involved in rescue operations are pessimistic, but still keeping their fingers crossed for the Sentinelese and Nicobarese, the two tribes seen as bearing the brunt of the killer wave. The bigger fear is for the Sentinelese, anthropologically the most...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

1204: What really happened? When Saladin retook the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem for Islam in 1187,Pope Innocent III declared a new crusade to recapture it. But the crusaders ran into financial difficulties and took advantage of Greek imperial in fighting to raise money. The scheme was a disaster, laying Constantinople to waste, gutting its churches and sending many of its citizens into slavery in Europe. The crusaders never went on to Jerusalem, but calcified the mistrust between eastern and western Christendom IN THE history of crusading, the idea that Christians should unite against Muslims for the defence of the Holy...

'This won't go away. What happened is much nastier than is being reported' By Adrian Blomfeld in Nairobi and Andrew Alderson (Filed: 15/02/2004) Alex Polier, the twenty-four year old journalist who could end Senator John Kerry's hopes of becoming the next president of the United States is alleged to have had a two-year affair with the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Last night the rumours were in danger of becoming a full-blown scandal. "This is not going to go away," one American friend of Miss Polier said yesterday. "What actually happened is much nastier than is being reported." The allegations...