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For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply "the Hacker." Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device—a stingray—were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest. Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it's not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told The Wall Street Journal in response...

Real estate industry warns of consequences Fearing another blow to a still-fragile housing market, real estate agents are pushing Congress to grant a long-term extension to the National Flood Insurance Program, which is set to expire this month for the 10th time in two years. Established by Congress in 1968, the program provides coverage to more than 5.6 million home and business owners in more than 21,000 communities nationwide that have adopted floodplain management plans in an effort to mitigate flood damage. Though private insurers sell the policies and administer claims, the federal government sets rates and assumes liability for...

“The U.S. can pay any debt because we can always print more money.”–Alan Greenspan Meet the Press August 7, 2011 Last week, Nouriel Roubini released a paper, “A Radical Policy Response to the Rising Risks of a Depression and Financial Crisis.” He writes: “Data suggest that developed and emerging markets alike are heading for a massive slowdown in growth, with advanced economies already slumping to stall speed.” Roubini is right, but for the wrong reasons. Government intervention is the root cause of the financial crisis and the maladies identified by Roubini. Many of his proposals, such as debt restructuring and...

Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman's presidential campaigns both issued statements late Thursday responding to The Cable's interview with a senior foreign policy advisor for Rick Perry, in which the advisor clarified Perry's stance on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. "[Perry] would lean toward wanting to bring our troops home, but he understands that we have vital strategic interests in Afghanistan and that a precipitous withdrawal is not what he's recommending," the advisor said. "He has a clear sense of the mission and wanting to win it, but not just by throwing the kitchen sink at it." In an e-mail titled, "Rick's...

To win in 2012, Obama's going to have to act a bit more like the tyrants he's so proud of toppling. Barack Obama can't get away from talking about dictators. Four years ago, candidate Obama controversially asserted that his administration would be open to negotiations with autocratic governments like Syria, Iran, and North Korea. Today, responding to Republican criticisms that he has been weak or hesitant on foreign policy, the U.S. president's supporters are more likely to trot out the fact that three longtime dictatorships have fallen under his watch. How much credit the president deserves for this is certainly...

Gov. Rick Snyder plans to direct doctors in Michigan to begin monitoring the body weight of their young patients and provide the data to a state registry in one of the most extensive government efforts to address the growing problem of pediatric obesity, the Associated Press has learned. The move would help track the state's growing obesity problem while opening the way for doctors to be more proactive in offering advice, Snyder spokeswoman Sara Wurfel told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The Republican governor will announce the initiative Wednesday as part of his proposal for improving Michigan residents' health. The...

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public. They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands. Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes...

The dingo came to Australia via southern China, and much earlier than previously thought, says new research. THE DINGO (Canis lupus dingo) first appeared in Australia's archaeological records in 3500-year-old rock paintings in the Pilbara region of WA, but the new evidence suggests they were roaming Australia long before that. DNA samples from domestic Asian dog species and the Australian dingo have shed light on how the iconic canine arrived on Australian soil. According to a study by an international research team, genetic data shows the dingo may have originated in southern China, travelling through mainland southeast Asia and Indonesia to...

A small country, its land reclaimed from a hostile nature, fights for survival against overwhelming odds for 80 years. Surrounded by enemies dedicated to its destruction, it fields the world's most innovative army and beats them. Despite three generations of war, the arts, sciences and commerce flourish. Its population grows quickly while the conflict empties the failed states that surround it. And it becomes a beacon of hope for the cause of freedom. I refer not to Israel, but to the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, whose struggle for freedom against Spain set the precedent for the American Revolution....

If on September 11, 2001, you sold stocks and bought crude oil, silver and gold — as many people did — and then held those things for the next decade, you’d have done really, really well.A chart posted by Bespoke Investment Group yesterday illustrates this starkly. The best performing asset class of the past decade has been silver, up more than 900%, from $4.16 an ounce to nearly $42 at last check. Gold has been a healthy second, up nearly 568%, from about $272 an ounce to about $1854.Crude-oil, which everybody expected to be a big winner after Sept. 11,...

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez has acknowledged her paternal grandparents came to the U.S. illegally, amid national attention and protests over her ongoing efforts to bar illegal immigrants from getting driver's licenses. "I know they arrived without documents, especially my father's father," the Republican said Wednesday in an interview in Spanish with KLUZ-TV, the Albuquerque Univision affiliate. Martinez has long acknowledged her Mexican heritage. But when asked previously about reports that her grandfather was an illegal immigrant, her office has said Martinez was unsure of his status since he abandoned the family when her father was young. Her comments Wednesday...

A Hastings man and his fiancee came face to face with some unexpected wildlife near Prescott, Wis., on Friday afternoon. Derrick Radke and Cheryl McKenna were boating when they found a 3-foot-long alligator swimming in the Mississippi River, near an island where they had planned to camp. Radke said he initially thought the gator was a muskrat - until it swam toward his 16-1/2-foot fishing boat. Radke went after the gator and got as close as a couple feet as it was sunning itself on a log, seemingly unafraid of him. "I've been on the river all my life," said...

Tonight, President Obama will speak to the nation about ways in which he believes Washington can inject some adrenaline into the languishing economic recovery. It isn't hard to figure out why: job growth has been trending down and may have ceased altogether in August. With unemployment still near double digits, that's a big problem. Some reports indicate that he'll announce one stimulus measure that purports to cost taxpayers nothing. The administration may push Fannie and Freddie to allow more homeowners to refinance at current very low mortgage interest rates. The measure might sound good in theory but will ultimately amount...

A senior Republican senator has asked the Justice Department to explain why its civil lawyers filed court papers questioning prosecutors’ conclusions that an Army researcher mailed the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people in 2001. In a letter this week to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller [3], Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa said the department’s decision to quickly retract the contradictory filings “has produced a new set of questions regarding this unsolved crime.”Grassley, who's among several members of Congress who've been outspoken skeptics about the FBI’s conclusion, homed in on a development first reported collaboratively in...

Germany's top court averted potential disaster for the eurozone Tuesday by clearing rescue packages for struggling economies, as lawmakers in three of Europe's major capitals voted on key finance reforms. Share prices soared across Europe in the wake of the ruling, with German stocks at one point rising by more than three percent. The markets were also keeping a close eye on events in the French, Italian and Spanish parliaments where governments are trying to force through austerity packages in the face of widespread opposition. In its ruling, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, western Germany, said MPs should have a...

THIS is the moment a group of chimpanzees sees daylight for the first time in 30 years — after being locked in cages for medical testing. The animals hugged each other in delight before they took their first steps outside. Emotional footage, below, shows how they reacted to their new surroundings. The outing marked the end of a 14-year bid to re-integrate the 38 primates after they spent most of their lives cooped up inside. One commentator said: "They hugged as if saying, 'We're finally free'. And then they laughed." The chimpanzees were taken from their mothers shortly after their...

The Great Pyramid–built for the Pharaoh Khufu in about 2570 B.C., sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and still arguably the most mysterious structure on the planet. Photo: Wikicommons There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King’s Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot where Khufu, the most powerful ruler of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (c.2690-2180 BC),...

A Countryman Tries to Unravel the Unsolved Mystery of Charles Nungesser's Last Flight PARIS—Right after his historic, 33-hour trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, Charles Lindbergh asked whether there was news of French aviator Charles Nungesser. Mr. Nungesser, an adventurer and World War I ace, was Mr. Lindbergh's great rival in the race to fly nonstop across the Atlantic in one direction or the other. He had set off with a navigator from Paris for New York just two weeks before Mr. Lindbergh's flight. But his biplane—called L'Oiseau Blanc, or White Bird—never arrived in New York, and...

Beginning in June of 1940, the North African Campaign took place over the course of three years, as Axis and Allied forces pushed each other back and forth across the desert in a series of attacks and counterattacks. Libya had been an Italian colony for several decades and British forces had been in neighboring Egypt since 1882. When Italy declared war on the Allied Nations in 1940, the two armies began skirmishing almost immediately. An Italian invasion of Egypt in September of 1940 was followed by a December counterattack where British and Indian forces captured some 130,000 Italians. Hitler's response...

The 21-foot, 600-kg seawater crocodile caught in Agusan del Sur may very well be the largest one captured but certainly not the first nor will it perhaps be the last one to be captured in the wild. Project director Ronald Nuer of the Bunawan Municipal Council said it took them 21 nights to snare the behemoth which, to the alarm of those who caught it, twice got out the restraining ropes before it was finally tied down after which it became overly “aggressive" three times. Nuer added that according to the Palawan Wildlife Conservation Center which helped capture the crocodile,...