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March 22, 2008 Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers face downgrading Tom Bawden in New York Profits at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers could deteriorate significantly this year if the turmoil sweeping the capital markets persists, a leading research agency said yesterday. Standard & Poor's (S&P) gave warning that it might cut the credit ratings on both investment banks, lowering the outlook on Goldman and Lehman from “stable” to “negative”. That comment, which coincided with reports of looming job losses at Goldman, could result in higher borrowing costs and a fall in the banks' shares. S&P praised Goldman Sachs for producing...

Bill Clinton helped elevate Richardson to the national stage: He named him his energy secretary and U.N. ambassador. And Clinton left no doubt about how importantly he viewed Richardson's support for his wife's campaign: He flew to New Mexico to sit down with Richardson and watch the Super Bowl as part of a high-profile courtship. But Richardson stopped returning Bill Clinton''s telephone calls days ago, the former president's aides said. And as of Friday, Richardson said, he had yet to pick up the telephone to call his former boss to tell him of his decision. The reaction of some of...

Libyan leader says the Bible is counterfeit Thursday, 20th March 2008. 11:42am By: Manasseh Zindo. LIBYAN leader Col Muammar Gadaffi, who is in Uganda, on Wednesday March 19 celebrated the anniversary of the birth of Prophet Mohammed with a series of attacks on European countries and the Bible for besmirching the Prophet Gadaffi was speaking to a large crowd at Nakivubo War Memorial Stadium in Kampala after leading the Thuhur (afternoon) prayer, where he said any Bible and Torah (Old Testament) that does not mention the Prophet Mohammed was written by mankind and therefore a fraud. Full article posted here

Spurgeon's Morning & Evening - March 22 -------------------------------- Morning Devotional "And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed." - Matthew 26:39 There are several instructive features in our Saviour's prayer in his hour of trial. It was lonely prayer. He withdrew even from his three favoured disciples. Believer, be much in solitary prayer, especially in times of trial. Family prayer, social prayer, prayer in the Church, will not suffice, these are very precious, but the best beaten spice will smoke in your censer in your private devotions, where no ear hears but God's. It was...

CAMPBELL HALL — When Sean Harrington drives around Orange County, he scans the roadsides looking for wires, overturned dirt, suspicious-looking rocks or any other evidence he's about to be attacked. He can't help it. Harrington, 24, did two tours in Iraq, leading patrols both in Kirkuk and in the south. His squad's job was to protect Iraqi truck drivers transporting goods from the port city of Umm Qsar to the interior. "My unit was hit 21 times," he said at his home in Campbell Hall, where he's enjoying a week's leave from Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. "It seemed...

The 47-year-old mother of two couldn't explain the sudden burst of strength that allowed her to get inside the home, where the elderly family friend lived alone. But Russo quickly swung into action after spotting the incapacitated Schwing through a window Thursday afternoon.

Psalms and incense filled the air of the Holy City of Jerusalem on what is known as Good Friday, as thousands of Christian pilgrims from around the world prayed along the traditional route Jesus took to his crucifixion. The faithful, several of them bearing large wooden crosses, walked in procession along the cobblestoned streets of Jerusalem's Old City, following the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Suffering, where Jesus is said to have carried the cross on which he was later crucified by the Romans. "This is where Jesus suffered, and we are following in his footsteps," said Flora Seguirante, a...

LONDON (AFP) - President Nicolas Sarkozy will tell British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during a state visit next week that he plans to send an extra 1,000 French soldiers to Afghanistan, the Times reported Saturday. One anonymous senior minister told the paper that Britain's Ministry of Defence is working on the assumption that Sarkozy will reveal a deployment of "slightly more than 1,000 troops to the eastern region" to fight the Taliban. Sarkozy wants to underline his commitment to NATO during the visit but a formal announcement may not be made until a NATO summit in Bucharest next month, the...

ATLANTA: Investigators initially thought a terrorism suspect may have been using his wedding plans to cloak the real purpose of his overseas travel, an FBI agent testified Friday. . . . Inside the lining of the bag, agents found two CDs, maps of Washington, D.C., and Fairfax, Virginia, and some scraps of paper with writing on them.Previously, prosecutors have alleged that "casing videos" of the Capitol building, the World Bank and a fuel tank farm were sent by computer from a nonprofit where Sadequee worked in Atlanta to a counterpart in London.

Why can’t Democrats just come right out and condemn discrimination? Let’s be honest: Barack Obama’s “I Go To Extremes” speech is little more than the “Mend It, Don’t End It” speech of the 2000s. Just as President Clinton could not fully bring himself to condemn racial preferences thirteen years ago, so too can Obama not fully reject the rough rhetoric of his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. This sort of cowardice will only hamper the further improvement of race relations in this country. Are Democrats truly interested in racial progress? I’m afraid the answer is no. I’ve felt this way...

TAMPA - Mary Jo Spack met two Freedom High School students March 14 and took them to a liquor store, police said Thursday. Spack, an honors English teacher at Freedom, then drove the students, ages 17 and 18, to a Howard Johnson motel on Fowler Avenue where they drank alcohol together, an arrest report states. "Those kids were texting some friends that they were going to have a party at this motel," police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said. Three other students joined them in the motel room, McElroy said. The 17-year-old told police he had sex with Spack in the shower....

Luke 22:1-6 Now the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew near, which is called the Passover. 2 And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to put him to death, for they feared the people. 3 Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve. 4 He went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them. 5 And they were glad, and agreed to give him money. 6 So he consented and sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of...

OK, so race is an issue in the current presidential campaign. It was, from the beginning, along with gender. When both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton proclaimed that neither should be considerations, I scoffed in a recent column. Continues...================================================================ Obama: I didn't inhale the 'Hate Whitey' sermons By "JohnHuang2" Monday, March 17, 2008 There isn't a smidgen of evidence that he had denounced the nut preacher's words before the firestorm broke out last week. And it is a fact that the pastor's unpastoral bent for spewing madrassa-like hateful inventive and his penchant for toxic racist rants from the pulpit were...

In the turbulent 1960s, a civil rights movement arose that resulted in the creation of a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Soon, there were state commissions on civil rights around the country. Then came the U.S. Commission on the Status of Women. Soon, there followed state Commissions on the Status of Women. Perhaps it is time for a Commission on the Status of Freedom. America grew into a powerful, prosperous nation because its Constitution guaranteed to every citizen the freedom endowed by the Creator. While it took a century to extend those freedoms to black Americans, and to women, the...

Tom Borelli is so sure the Walt Disney Co. is suppressing the DVD release of the 2006 miniseries "The Path to 9/11" for political reasons that he is ready to put up money to prove the point. Mr. Borelli, a Disney shareholder, accused Disney CEO Robert Iger at a March 6 shareholders' meeting of blocking the release of "Path" in order to protect Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the legacy of her husband's administration. Mr. Iger countered at the time that the decision not to release the miniseries on DVD was motivated by business considerations, not political ones. Mr. Borelli...

Barack Obama — the self-anointed soul-fixing, nation-healing political Messiah — has lost his glow. That is the takeaway from the beleaguered Democratic presidential candidate's "major" speech in Philadelphia Tuesday. For all of his supposedly unique and transcendent understanding of race in America, Mr. Obama's talk amounted to the same old, same old. The Glowbama mystique has gone the way of the emperor's clothes. Instead of accountability, we got excuses. Instead of disavowal of demagoguery, we got whacked with the moral equivalence card. Instead of rejecting the Blame America mantra of left-wing black nationalism, we got more Blame Whitey. Same old,...

It's a generational thing. That was the theme of Barack Obama's speech last Tuesday, in which he both failed to renounce and at the same time separated himself from the man he has described as his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama said that Wright's bellowing, "God damn America," was just a response to the evil treatment of America's blacks all those years ago by an old man (66) who does not realize, as Obama does and as the success of Obama's candidacy shows, that America is not static but has been perfecting itself. Obama's even tone and his...

About 50 members of the Students for a Democratic Society club at Shaker Heights High School poured out of Terminal Tower and joined another 30 students already at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. Thursday's protest against the war was the first for the "new" SDS in Cleveland. This is not your grandfather's SDS from the '60s - but it kind of looked like it. Josh Davidson, a leader of the Shaker Heights SDS, said students are drawn to the SDS for one reason: "The war is the focal point, definitely the focal point," he said. The group was reconstituted in...

NYT (Feb 23) - ".....Mr. McCain’s campaign announced Friday afternoon that it had just recorded its single-best 24 hours in online fund-raising, although it declined to provide numbers." - UPDATE: "Newsweek" - "As for McCain … well, the Arizona senator raised just over $11 million [in February]--slightly less than what he raised in January, the month he won New Hampshire and regained his political mojo." http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/03/21/mccain-s-money-woes.aspx

PYONGYANG, March 22 (AP) - (Kyodo)—North Korea is aiming at winning more than 10 medals during the Beijing Olympics this summer, an official of the country's Olympic committee says. Jong Hae Man, vice director of the DPRK Olympic Committee's technique and training subcommittee, told Kyodo News that so far, about 50 athletes are training for 10 sports North Korea has qualified to compete in during the Summer Games. DPRK is the acronym of North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. When asked about the number of medals North Korea will try to win, Jong said, "Our aim...