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The Houston Astros will hold a press conference this afternoon to announce the hiring of Brad Mills as the new field Manager for the team. Brad Mills, who spent the last six years working under former college roommate and teammate Terry Francona as the bench coach for the Boston Red Sox, has been named as the new manager of the Astros.

Paul Abdul may not return to "American Idol" for a ninth season, her manager claimed in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times. "She's not a happy camper as a result of what's going on. She's hurt. She's angry," David Sonenberg, the "Idol" judge's manager, told the newspaper on Friday. David, who said that he became Paula's manager just weeks ago, at the end of June, added that he has yet to receive a proposal for a new contract for Paula. "I find it under these circumstances particularly unusual; I think unnecessarily hurtful," he said. "I find it kind...

LOS ANGELES – A Beverly Hills hedge fund manager was arrested Friday on a charge he bilked investors out of $44.3 million, including $5 million he lost playing poker, the U.S. attorney's office said. Bradley L. Ruderman, 46, surrendered to FBI agents after being named in a wire fraud complaint. He was later released on $500,000 bond. The government alleges he spent at least $8.7 million of investor money on personal expenses including a summer rental of a Malibu beach home and two Porsches. He admitted in an FBI interview that he lost $5.2 million of investor money in poker...

NEW YORK – New York's attorney general filed civil fraud charges Monday against a hedge fund manager who funneled $2.4 billion to Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff without telling clients where their money was going. The complaint accuses J. Ezra Merkin, ... of concealing his links to Madoff and lying to investors about what he was doing with their money, .. Over the years, Merkin collected $470 million in fees and performance bonuses from his clients, .. "Merkin duped individual investors, non-profits, and charities .. in actuality he was dumping them into history's largest Ponzi scheme," Attorney General Andrew Cuomo...

A company boss insulted a manager over her decision to convert to Islam, an industrial tribunal has heard. Caroline Elgedawy was allegedly humiliated in front of other directors from Lincoln-based property firm Hanover Park Commercial. The tribunal heard that chief executive Andy Halstead became abusive over her decision to eat only halal meat. Mr Halstead told the Nottingham tribunal he did not make the comments at a company Christmas party. Mrs Elgedawy, 32, who earned £52,000-a-year as head of business information and strategy at the firm, converted to Islam after marrying her Egyptian husband Reda, the tribunal heard. Abusive outburst...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9, 2005 – When American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the side of the Pentagon at 9:39 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Lee Evey was unaware that anything was wrong, let alone that three years worth of hard work was in ruins. The then-Pentagon Renovation Program manager was driving to North Carolina to attend a funeral when he stopped for lunch. He had not been listening to the radio. "(The) people were a little bit slow coming out to serve me and when they came out they apologized for being so slow but said they had been in...

SALISBURY - Rowan County officials paid private investigators more than $23,000 over the past five years to search for the writer of anonymous letters criticizing county spending. According to the private eyes, that person turned out to be one of the county's own. The Board of Commissioners never discussed or approved spending for the investigation at any formal meeting. Only County Manager Tim Russell, his assistants and possibly two commissioners' chairmen knew of the investigation, The Salisbury Post reported. Russell said he hired the agency because of the letters' threatening tone. The investigation was revealed after Kiker Investigations issued a...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday stood behind her indicted former fund-raiser after prosecutors said Ted Kennedy's brother-in-law taped him making "incriminating" statements about her Senate campaign's Hollywood gala. "The Senate campaign committee fully cooperated with the investigation. [David] Rosen worked hard for the campaign and we trust that when all the facts are in, he will be cleared," Clinton lawyer David Kendall said in an e-mail to The Post. Rosen goes to trial May 3 on charges of falsely underreporting the costs of the August 2000 gala — thus inflating the amount of campaign cash ostensibly raised for Clinton at...

An operations manager for Jack in the Box was late for a meeting and called his boss to let him know he was running late. As the manager was leaving the voicemail message, he witnessed an accident and went on to provide a "play by play" account of the incident. This is the actual voicemail message. It was forwarded so many times within Jack in the Box that it crashed their voicemail server. Click Here For Audio

Have you ever been issued a "guaranteed" reservation by a hotel? You know the drill: they take a credit card number and tell you that you will be charged for the room if you don't show up. But in return, you comfort yourself with the assumption that your access to an actual room at that particular hotel is "guaranteed" even if you show up at 4 AM. Maybe if you did this, you assumed that it meant that the hotel had already sold the room to you, and that, barring acts of God like a tornado, no matter how late...

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!

SACRAMENTO (AP) - A veteran of state transportation programs, who also served on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's reorganization committee, was named to head the Department of Motor Vehicles Monday. Joan Borucki, 48, began her career with CalTrans in 1980 and rose through the ranks to become chief deputy director of the California Transportation Commission. Most recently she also served as a team leader on infrastructure issues on the California Performance Review, the governor's effort to streamline the state bureaucracy. Among the recommendations from the Performance Review is the creation of a massive new department to oversee water, energy, growth, housing and...

WASHINGTON – The job certainly has its upside. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency knows the world's biggest secrets; visits kings, princes, and presidents - usually during the dark of night in mysterious places; travels with a contingent of heavily armed guards; and oh, yes, meets nearly every day with the president. But power and intrigue aside, it may be difficult to fill the spacious seventh-floor office with sweeping views of wooded northern Virginia left vacant by George Tenet this week. For one thing, there is the overwhelming challenge of overhauling a $40 billion, broken intelligence community. The lapses...

Bitter at the Top By DAVID BROOKS Published: June 15, 2004 It's been said that every society has two aristocracies. The members of the aristocracy of mind produce ideas, and pass along knowledge. The members of the aristocracy of money produce products and manage organizations. In our society these two groups happen to be engaged in a bitter conflict about everything from S.U.V.'s to presidents. You can't understand the current bitter political polarization without appreciating how it is inflamed or even driven by the civil war within the educated class. The percentage of voters with college degrees has doubled in...

Mar. 16, 2004: IowaPresidentialWatch.com speculates on who Joe Trippi's been advising since his departure from Howard "I have a Scream" Dean's campaign.

Citrix Systems has released its single sign-on product, even as it prepares to debut an enhanced version of MetaFrame XP. The Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based company said Wednesday it has begun shipping Citrix MetaFrame Password Manager, priced at $179 per user. MetaFrame Password Manager, one of several products billed under the company's new MetaFrame Access Suite brand, was developed under the code name of Project Bimini. Once a user authenticates to a system using a single password, MetaFrame Password Manager automatically logs the user into any password-protected system while enforcing password policies. It also monitors all password-related events and can automate...

Two-year hunt tracked al-Qa'ida 'branch manager' to Thailand By Kathy Marks in Sydney 16 August 2003 A two-year manhunt across South-east Asia ended in the back streets of the ancient Thai city of Ayutthaya, where Riduan Isamuddin, one of the linchpins of al-Qa'ida's terrorist network, was arrested at a block of flats with a cache of weapons and explosives. Isamuddin, alias Hambali, a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, was being questioned by US investigators at a secret location yesterday and his capture was hailed as a massive coup in the fight against terrorism. On the run since late 2001, Hambali,...

<p>HOUSTON - The NASA official who ran shuttle management meetings during the fatal Columbia mission said Tuesday that she did not hear about the continuing worries of engineers concerning debris that had struck the shuttle.</p> <p>In her first public statement, Linda Ham, chairwoman of the mission management team, defended NASA and its people with passion, and when she described her own experience, she became tearful. But her account also depicted a space agency in which internal communications broke down, whether because of failure of process or of courage.</p>

Ex-Stokes manager had computer full of porn Finding led officials to fire him, not accept resignation By Sherry Wilson Youngquist JOURNAL REPORTER DANBURY The former county manager for Stokes County, Craig Greer, had downloaded so much Internet pornography that his computer hard drive at the government center was running out of space, county officials say. The cache of more than 27,000 photos - with such titles as 'Bye bye bikinis,' 'Housewife,' and 'Midget peep show' - was discovered by information-technology workers after Greer resigned April 28. County commissioners said yesterday that the discovery was behind their decision last week to...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - William W. Parsons, director of NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, was named today as the new manager of the space shuttle program.</p> <p>Parsons succeeds Ronald Dittemore, who resigned April 23. Dittemore rose to prominence while acting as a spokesman for the space agency following the destruction of space shuttle Columbia.</p>

Asif Iqbal, a Rochester, New York, management consultant, must get FBI clearance every Monday and Thursday when he flies to and from Syracuse for business. Iqbal can't get off a government watch list because he shares the same name as a suspected terrorist. But Asif Iqbal, the suspected terrorist, is eight years younger than his Rochester namesake. What's more, the suspected terrorist Iqbal has been in U.S. custody at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since January 2002 when he was captured in Afghanistan. In a letter to his congressional representative, Iqbal of New York said he was...

The managerial searches of the Giants, Mariners and Cubs proceed this week, but only one will play out in Arizona.Cubs President Andy MacPhail and General Manager Jim Hendry plan to meet today with Dusty Baker and his agent Jeef Moorad in the Phoenix area.'We hope we can get something resolved quickly, Hendry said.