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Merrill Lynch & Co Inc (NYSE:MER - News) reported about $16 billion in mortgage-related write-downs and adjustments on Thursday in the worst quarter of the company's history. Shares of the world's largest brokerage fell more than 8 percent as investors worried about more write-downs and exposure to capital-strapped bond insurers. The stock's 48 percent decline over the past year has slashed nearly $42 billion from Merrill's peak market capitalization of $84.7 billion in late January 2007. The start of a booming year for investment banking fees and big bets on subprime mortgages ended in dismal fashion. Merrill's fourth-quarter net loss...

Summers, an economics professor at Harvard University, had previously said $50 billion to $75 billion in tax cuts and pump-priming government spending is needed to boost the sagging economy. Now, his recommendation is double that — though perhaps employing a "trigger" that would release the money only if the economy worsens further. He said the advantage of employing a trigger to release a second stage of fiscal stimulus that could take effect without the need for new legislation is to avoid delays that could deliver an economic boost too late. "The risks here of 'too little, too late' are far,...

Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the "war on terror" is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday. A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a "fundamental re-think is required" if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective. "If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut," said Paul Rogers, the report's author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England. "Combined with conventional...

CBNNews.com - JERUSALEM - The Muslim call to prayer resounds through a large part of the Earth, where more than one billion people call themselves Muslims. Throughout the Islamic world, many Muslims from Gaza to London are also responding to the call to global jihad, where the goal is to take over the world for Islam. It's a clash of civilizations with the Christian faith in the middle. Throughout the nearly 1,400 year history of Islam, Muslims have resisted the Christian Gospel. Many Christians tried to reach them with the good news, but with little success. But according to many...

Some readers of HuffingtonPost.com have initiated a new wave of harassing phone calls to Swift Boat veterans who questioned John Kerry's military record in the 2004 campaign -- and the website's proprietors remained ignorant of it for days, despite repeated complaints. Last Saturday morning, HuffPost, Arianna Huffington's year-old online effort, linked to a story regarding the release of Navy personal information. By Saturday afternoon, two registered "trusted" HuffPost commenters posted the names and personal information of more than a dozen Swift Boat veterans. "SatanLivesinUSA" wrote at 2:15 p.m., June 24, "SwiftBoatVets who need some Black Ops done on them. I...

A group formed after 9/11 to push legislation requiring strict national standards for driver's licenses has hired the ad team that made headlines with its anti-Kerry work on behalf of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. The New York-based Coalition for a Secure Driver's License tells the Bulletin and U.S. News that an ad produced by Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm will begin running on Washington cable and network TV Monday. "They're the best," said William O'Reilly, whose public relations firm is working with the coalition. The goal of the effort is to win national regulations that will help block...

For Republican ad-man Rick Reed, the inaugural press conference of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was less a professional opportunity than a chance to catch up with kin. His uncle, Adrian Lonsdale, had been one of John Kerry's superior officers in Vietnam. The retired Coast Guard captain and more than a dozen other veterans were gathering in public for the first time to challenge various claims Kerry had made about his four-month tour of duty. "I thought those guys had a great story that needed to get out," says Reed. He returned to his office that afternoon, sent out...

. Though the election is over, the Swift Boat Vets fight continues. Their primary target had been Sen. John Kerry, but all along there was a secondary fight going on with many elements of the mainstream media, which continually presented their case as “discredited,” though the Vets thought at most their accounts were “disputed” by the Kerry campaign. In their post-election coverage, Newsweek wrote, “When the Swift Boat vets made ads attacking Kerry with images from his 1971 testimony, they used a voice-over, an actor reading Kerry’s words.” Today, Rick Reed, a partner in the Stevens, Reed, Curcio and Potholm...

<p>During the latter part of the coming weeks, the program " Stolen Honor " will get publicity in radio and newspaper ads and wide showing on Sinclair broadcast stations. The video can be obtained from www.stolenhonor.com. The Kerry campaign will fiercely oppose it. In another development I have learned that after a Board of Review, Kerry was given an honorable discharge in 1978 by President Carter. Therefore, I assume that when Kerry left the Navy in 1972, he was given something less than an honorable discharge. We do not know what because that information is still buried in the records Kerry won't release. We also know that his medals were reissued in 1985 by Secretary of the Navy John Leyman. Therefore, I assume that Kerry's medals were officially taken away from him earlier because of a less-than-honorable discharge.</p>

While I have a tremendous amount of respect for Ted Koppel and ABC News I was appalled to learn that ABC News would go to the lengths of traveling to Vietnam to interview three Viet Cong communists in yet a third attempt by ABC to corroborate John Kerry’s version of the events that took place on February 28th, 1969.

Midnight in South Vietnam, and the river is black. Past the rice paddies and shacks, small fires are burning by the shoreline as Lt. John H. Davis' 50-foot aluminum swift boat -- PCF 19 -- makes its routine patrol through the reeds. In a split second, rocket fire shatters the silence, and through a plume of oily smoke, the boat sinks to the river's bottom. "My whole crew lost their lives that night. I was the only one who survived," Lt. Davis says. Lt. Davis, now 62, lost his left eye. The bones in both legs were shattered. But the...

To: davidbroder@washpost.com Sent: 9/26/2004 9:12:25 AM Subject: The Media Losing Their Way You are a better journalist than this. Your reference to the vets with assertions of "scurrilous and largely inaccurate attack on the Vietnam service of John Kerry" does NOT fit with the ads. The Swift Boat vets ads address Kerry's action AFTER Vietnam. That is Kerry himself in his own words testifying before Congress scurrilously slandering the Vietnam veterans. They have every right -- indeed the duty -- to react in their own defense. That is Kerry himself in his own words making the disgraceful "medals over the...