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Data from the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission, show the sun has reduced its output of solar wind to the lowest levels since accurate readings became available. The sun's current state could reduce the natural shielding that envelops our solar system. "The sun's million mile-per-hour solar wind inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system. It influences how things work here on Earth and even out at the boundary of our solar system where it meets the galaxy," said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind instrument principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research...

The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers. As panicked politicians prepare to fork over $1 trillion in taxpayer funding to rescue the financial industry, they've fingered regulation, deregulation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, greedy banks, greedy borrowers, greedy short-sellers and minority home ownership mau-mauers (can't call 'em greedy, that would be racist) for blame. But there's one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis. It's no coincidence that most of the areas hardest...

At 10 minutes to one on Tuesday afternoon, South Africa’s new order discovered just how vulnerable its economy is. Already jittery over the upheaval of the recent days, investors were aghast to read the name of Trevor Manuel, the respected finance minister, on a list of 11 ministers and three deputy ministers resigning following the political coup that brought Thabo Mbeki’s nine-year rule as president to an end at the weekend. By five past two, a frantic sell-off had sent the rand plunging by more than 3 per cent against the dollar, its biggest fall for more than four years...

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson will address the House Republican Conference Wednesday morning as the White House continues in full battle mode to spur dubious House conservatives into supporting a $700 billion Wall Street bailout. The White House is also deploying economic "jump" teams to the House side of the Capitol to answer questions from skeptical Republicans to try to gin up support for the measure. Among those already dispatched to the Capitol Tuesday were Eddie Lazear, head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Keith Hennessey of the National Economic Council.

WASHINGTON, Sept 23 - Banks can expect to pay significantly higher premiums for deposit insurance starting next month, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp said on Tuesday. "We are going to be raising premiums in early October, not shockingly but significantly," FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said during a discussion on housing and financial markets. Bair repeated her view that the Deposit Insurance Fund, which stood at $45 billion at the end of June, has sufficient funds to withstand an expected increase in bank failures. "I think, actually, the banking sector is holding up pretty well," she said.

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.) And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to...

<p>Jews, according to both anti-Semites and philo-Semites, are smart folks. Anti-Semites claim that Jews are highly intelligent -- and therefore threaten the world via conspiratorial monetary and political control. Philo-Semites point out that Jews have provided a vastly disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners, as well as various leading scientists, philosophers, writers and artists. Virtually everyone agrees, then, that Jews are intelligent. And yet for all of our intelligence (I am an Orthodox Jew), large groups of American Jews lack the most basic instinct for self-preservation; they lack the understanding to protect Jews by acting to protect Israel. The non-religious Jewish community demonstrates particular blindness. Most non-religious Jews, who see no special value in Jewish identity, distract themselves with "social justice" policies -- policies like abortion-on-demand and gay marriage -- that directly contravene traditional Jewish values. Meanwhile, they ignore existential threats to Jews worldwide -- threats they cannot escape with protestations that they aren't practicing Jews, or that their Judaism only goes as far as the occasional bagel. For many non-religious Jews, political liberalism trumps both Jewish values and Jewish existence. How else to explain the disastrous series of events last week in New York? The United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York scheduled an anti-Iran rally highlighting the blatant Jew-hatred of visiting Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Federation invited both Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (R-AK). Palin accepted. So, at first, did Clinton -- but when she learned that she would be appearing on the same stage as Palin, she backed out. At that point, the organizers of the rally made a terrible decision: They disinvited Palin. Politico.com reported that the decision was made after Democrats complained that they did not want the rally turned into a partisan event. This is the height of idiocy. In the possibility of a nuclear Iran, Jews face the gravest menace since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. They must mobilize every ally, unearth every friend, in order to create a groundswell of support for a military strike against Iran by Israel -- the only true solution to Iranian nuclear ambition. And yet they turned away Sarah Palin -- perhaps the future vice president of the United States, and at the moment, the most popular female politician in the United States -- because they feared offending Democrats. Only a baseline allegiance to the Democratic Party -- only a deep-rooted leftist partisanship -- can explain such behavior. Any rational group, seeking to draw attention to the Iranian situation, would leap at the opportunity to host Palin, who routinely draws tens of thousands of fans. More than that, any rational group would recognize that if high-ranking Democrats withdraw from anti-Iran rallies simply to avoid being seen in public with high-ranking Republicans, then perhaps Democrats aren't the friends of Israel they purport to be. Any rational group would be suspicious that Hillary Clinton is more concerned with Sarah Palin than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Any rational group would use their anti-Iran rally as a forum for candidates, allowing those with the most pro-Israel message to capitalize politically. Instead, the organizers disinvited Palin. In doing so, they demonstrated a political bias unworthy of a pro-Israel organization. More than that: In rejecting Palin, they demonstrated loyalty to Democrats over loyalty to Jewish causes. That became especially clear when the text of Palin's un-given speech was released. "We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator's intentions and to call for action to thwart him," the speech reads. "He must be stopped. The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a 'Final Solution' -- the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a 'stinking corpse' that is 'on its way to annihilation.' … Iran should not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Period. And in a single voice, we must be loud enough for the whole world to hear: Stop Iran!" This is strong stuff. And it is stuff that the rally organizers abandoned when they kowtowed to Democrats rather than recognizing that support for Israel must be a non-partisan issue. It was foolish. It was dangerous. And most of all, it was dishonorable.</p>

Federal government (US) is said to be getting 80% of AIG, the largest insurer on the globe.

In this climatic of times when fingers are pointing in every which way and the ability to know whom is trustworthy and whom is not is not easily attainable, words such as the "rich people don't 'deserve' their money" may sound tantalizingly good, but it is wrought with dangerous ramifications. When politicians say that the rich don't need the extra money, the response ought to be, "government doesn't need it either." Placing taxes on the uber-rich and the corporations will just transfer their wealth to the coffers of others in Washington D.C. The promise may be that the taxed amount...

Dear Mahmoud I wrote a letter to President Ahmadinejad, posted on NRO on Monday. I thought you’d want to see it: I’m writing to you about death, one of your favorite themes. Your adult life has revolved around it. You’re from the Revolutionary Guards, the military organization that was created in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970s. The then-incipient Revolutionary Guards were trained there by the expert terrorists of al Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s gang of killers (Sunnis, by the way, as you well know). One day, the camp was bombed by the Israelis, and a considerable number of...

Finland's prime minister has called for gun laws to be tightened after a school shooting that left 11 people dead. Matti Vanhanen said he believed handguns should no longer be used outside shooting ranges. Matti Juhani Saari shot fellow students at a college in western Finland before turning his gun on himself. It emerged that he had been questioned by police after posting on the internet a video clip of himself at a shooting range, but had not been detained. Valid licences Mr Vanhanen told Finnish television: "We have to tighten the law significantly. "In terms of handguns that can...

A fellow freeper emailed the following message to me tonight: Is it possible that you can do me a big favor? I some how got logged out of all my forums the other day. I got back into them all except Free Republic. I have requested my password several times and it has never come. My friend in another state is having the same problem and a friend in another state signed up better never got the confirmation email. We have also email them and gotten no response. Something must be wrong with the site. Would you mind putting up...

South Africa's political landscape is changing faster than anyone anticipated. The speed of events over the past few days has inevitably created an atmosphere of uncertainty, and some apprehension. The sudden resignation of President Thabo Mbeki has drawn a welter of calls for clear and strong leadership, lest the country finds itself on the path to becoming "a banana republic", to quote the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. However, change has been on the cards since the historic African National Congress (ANC) national conference in Polokwane last December. Thabo Mbeki, seeking a third term as party leader, was defeated by...

One of the world's leading biologists, who is also an ordained Anglican priest, has sparked uproar in both religious and scientific circles by campaigning to teach creationism, along with evolution and the "Big Bang" theory in science classrooms. Creationism, an issue that has triggered furious debates in churches, schools and even courts in the United States, rejects Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and holds that God created the universe and all that goes with it - most of all, man - in six days. The Rev. Michael Reiss has truly stirred the pot - and the fury of his fellow...

Palin tribute “Sarah Smile by Lloyd Marcus” music video on YouTube has over 40,000 hits and rapidly growing. Enjoy and please pass it on. God bless, Lloyd http://www.youtube..com/watch?v=np8IAoP8B4M

DEWEY BEACH, Delaware (CNN) -- Although Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden routinely mocks his Republican counterpart, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for her onetime support of the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," Biden and his running mate voted to keep the project alive twice. Both Biden and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama voted to kill a Senate amendment that would have diverted federal funding for the bridge to repair a Louisiana span badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina, Senate records show. And both voted for the final transportation bill that included the $223 million earmark for the Alaska project. An amendment offered...

Congress wants Wall Street to feel it where it hurts: the wallet. The stratospheric pay packages of Wall Street executives have become a lightning rod issue as Congress shapes a $700 billion bailout for financial firms. Proposals circulating on Capitol Hill vary, but they all would impose some limits or approval authority on salaries of executives whose firms seek help. The moves in Washington mirror the popular outcry — in constituent e-mail messages and postings in the blogosphere — over the prospect of Wall Street’s tarnished titans walking away with tens of millions of dollars a year while taxpayers pick...

Everybody has an opinion on the outcome of the presidential race, and most partisans say their side will win. But for those folks, talk is cheap. Pollsters are different. Identifying trends that actually affect the outcomes of elections is a skill, and, as in any business, your track record counts.

Kathmandu: Thousands of Tibetan children and their families face stiff punishment at the hands of the Chinese government for enrolling into schools in India that are run by the Tibetan government in exile, headed by their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, a rights body said. The Washington-headquartered International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) has expressed its misgivings as the ultimatum issued by the Communist Party of China authorities to the Tibetan Party and government workers expired last week. In July, Communist Party authorities in the Tibet Autonomous Region had issued a directive stating that Tibetan children must confess if they have...

The man arrested near Sen. Barack Obama's home with a gun in his car has been charged with trespassing and unlawful use of a weapon by a felon, police said.