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U.S. stocks traded about 1 percent lower on Monday, following a decline in European equities on the collapse of weekend talks between Greece and its creditors. "Right now the key driver in the U.S. and international markets seems the breakdown in the Greece negotiations," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities. The Dow Jones industrial average fell back into the red for 2015. The index traded about 160 points lower after earlier falling nearly 200 points, with United Technologies leading all blue chips lower. Information technology led declines across all 10 S&P 500 sector

“А у вас негров линчуют” is a bitter Soviet-era punch line meaning, roughly, “But in your country they lynch Negroes.” There were a million Cold War variations on the joke: The Soviet farm minister meets his U.S. counterpart, who inquires about whether the heroic Soviet farmers are meeting their five-year plans. Asked about each crop in turn, the Soviet minister is forced to sheepishly admit that they are woefully behind on every goal, and then demands: “But what about the blacks in the South?” A U.S. car salesman asks a Soviet counterpart how many months the typical Soviet citizen must...

THE new Congress that starts work this week is the latest reminder of America’s stark political divisions: The parties in Washington are more polarized than they have been in decades, the partisanship gap between rural Republicans and urban Democrats has grown, and the battle for suburban voters keeps intensifying. Much less is said, however, about the equally significant economic division between conservative “red states” and liberal “blue states.” Blue states, like California, New York and Illinois, whose economies turn on finance, trade and knowledge, are generally richer than red states. But red states, like Texas, Georgia and Utah, have done...

Back in the Reagan days the Republicans were the BLUE Party; the Democrats were the RED Party. Somebody changed it after Reagan left politics; the switcharoo has been attributed to Tim Russert. At the time I didn't like it, but, judging from today's politics, it may have been a good move. The Democrats are acting like the typical blue-bloods of history. Those were the elitists who made their own laws and own law enforcement system. They, as an aristocracy, kept a safe distance between their own properties and lives and those of the common man. This is what we have...

The unrestricted use of fossil fuels must end soon if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change. That is the central message of a stark new report from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC urges that by 2050, most of the world's electricity must - and can - be produced from low carbon sources. Fossil fuels, without carbon capture and storage (CCS), should be phased out "almost entirely" by 2100. It re-states many familiar positions: Warming is "unequivocal" and the human influence on climate is clear Since the 1950s the observed changes are unprecedented over decades...

Submitted by David Stockman's Contra Corner Seymour Hersh’s Blockbuster: Obama On The Red Line And On The Rat Line Read Seymour Hersh’s devastating account of Obama’s Red Lines and Rat Lines and weep for the Republic. It is no more. For the first time in a half-century American voters actually elected the “peace candidate” in 2008 and sent Obama to the White House to end the interventionist foreign policy that had lead to disaster in Iraq, and, implicitly, to wind down the vast war machine that had been left over from the Cold War. The latter had been converted by...

lack Rocks Red-Flag Uniformitarian Flaws by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Red flags traditionally act as warning signals. In this case of a surprising rock discovery in West Virginia the flag is black rather than red, but the results are the same. Geologist Callan Bentley recently blogged about another problem with the uniformitarian model.1 As he and Alan Pitts examined the Hampshire Formation in eastern West Virginia, they came across an unexpected phenomenon: a 16-foot black shale and lime layer. The problem? This new layer is sandwiched smack-dab within a 2000-foot-thick pile of red-rock strata that has been labeled by secularists...

INDIANAPOLIS – The American Heart Association, through its Go Red For Women movement, urges everyone to support the fight against heart disease by wearing red on National Wear Red Day – Friday, Feb. 7. American Heart Month is in February, a perfect time to focus on the prevalence of heart disease, America’s No. 1 killer.

Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government. “The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every...

British police say they were called after a string of attacks on red-haired pupils at a school in northern England. The issue of bullying of red-haired children periodically arises in Britain, and some commentators have attributed the phenomenon to lingering anti-Celtic prejudice.

The two aerial strikes on Damascus in the past 48 hours, carried out by the Israel Air Force according to foreign media reports, are likely the result of classified intelligence indicating an imminent attempt to transfer strategic weapons from Syria to Hezbollah. With Hezbollah deploying up to half of its fighting force to Syria to help the regime of dictator Bashar Assad fight for its survival, the Lebanese Shi’ite organization will be seeking “rewards” for its actions. Hezbollah and its patron Iran may have asked Assad to make the advanced weapons available. It would seem that Assad cannot have been...

US Secretary of State John Kerry again warned Wednesday that time was slipping away to reach a Middle East peace deal, and for the first time said there may only be a year or two left. Appearing before US lawmakers for the first time since becoming America's top diplomat in February, Kerry said his three trips to the region already were proof of his commitment to try to find a way to resume peace talks, AFP reported. The Obama administration is "trying to find out what is possible," Kerry told the House foreign affairs committee, as he laid out the...

You can tell a lot about prosperity in America by observing the places people are moving to and where they are packing up and moving from. New Census Bureau data on metropolitan areas indicate that the South and the Sunbelt regions continue to grow, while the Northeast and Midwest continue to shrink. Among the 10 fastest-growing metro areas last year were Raleigh, Austin, Las Vegas, Orlando, Charlotte, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. All of these are in low-tax, business-friendly red states. Blue-state areas such as Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Providence and Rochester were among the biggest population losers. This migration...

Full Title - 'She didn't affirmatively say no': Silence means consent according to defense in Ohio high school rape trial where passed out, drunken teenage girl was 'sexually assaulted' by multiple football players' Defense lawyers in the coming trial of two high school football players charged with raping a nearly passed-out-drunk 16-year-old girl are expected to argue on the issue of consent. In the case that has shocked the nation, prosecutors state that the inebriated girl was taken to a number of parties by a group of drunk teenagers, supporting her to walk when she wasn't physically capable. The prosecution...

FARGO – Former Fargo radio and TV personality Ed Schultz slapped down speculation this week that MSNBC may replace him in its weekday lineup, according to media reports. The New York Times reported Sunday, citing anonymous sources, that MSNBC was considering replacing “The Ed Show” in the left-leaning cable news station’s 7 p.m. weekday time slot, opting instead for a show hosted by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein. MSNBC denied there prime-time programming changes in the works, TVNewser reported.

October 21, 2012 A year-long investigation by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has found that scores of known radical Islamists made hundreds of visits to the Obama White House, meeting with top administration officials

The Obama administration remained unimpressed on Thursday after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations and reiterated that the President would not set “red lines” for Iran. “As the prime minister said, the United States and Israel share the goal of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon," spokesman Tommy Vietor of the National Security Council said on Thursday, adding, “We will continue our close consultation and cooperation toward achieving that goal.” Meanwhile, officials in Washington quoted in the Israeli media praised Netanyahu for the conciliatory approach he took towards Obama but made ​​it clear that the United...

On this day in 1916, the German air ace Manfred von Richthofen—known to history as the "Red Baron"—shoots down his first enemy plane over the Western Front during World War I.

Congressman Mike Rogers [R-Michigan] gave an interview recently and said he walked out of a meeting a few weeks ago between you and US Ambassador Dan Shapiro with a sense that you were at wit’s end over American policy toward Iran. Are you? No, I am not at wit’s end. I believe we have to stop Iran, I believe we can stop Iran, and I think certain things are needed to do that. One of them is setting clear, designated limits to Iran’s nuclear weapons programs activities. I think that has not yet been done, but I am an old...

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