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Two major tech conferences scheduled to book thousands of hotel rooms in crime-infested San Francisco have been canceled. The San Francisco Business Times reports that the “IBM-owned open-source software giant Red Hat Inc. has canceled plans to host its annual technology summit at San Francisco’s Moscone Center in 2024 and 2025.” Two years wiped off the books. The report adds that both the 2024 and 2025 conferences would have generated around 40,000 hotel nights. Instead, the conferences are moving to Denver in 2024 and Orlando in 2025.

Politicians, bureaucrats, the UN, and a bunch of rich people had another climate change gabfest in Egypt that ended recently. These people flew in hundreds of private jets for a conference where they pretended that they could control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity forever and pretended they cared about their carbon footprint. Instead of presenting scientific facts, they base their policies on inaccurate and easily manipulated computer models. Facts would be inconvenient when they are trying to scare eight billion people into submission. In 1989, the UN predicted we only had ten years left to save the planet from...

As of today, it has been 273 (call it an absolute zero) days since Clinton’s last formal press conference on December 4, 2015, something even the left-leaning WaPo and NYT have expressed outrage against. Naturally, as questions mount if and when the Democratic Presidential candidate will finally speak to the press, overnight Clinton's press secretary, Brian Fallon, had some good news, when he assured an ABC News podcast that she will hold regular press conferences, but under one condition. That she is president, or as Nancy Pelosi might put it, "you have to elect her, to ask her questions." This...

The College Football Czar: 2016 Season Preview a sports publication from The Shinbone by Daniel Clark Welcome to the 2016 season preview issue of The College Football Czar, a seasonal sports publication by the author and editor of The Shinbone. In the coming months, you will find weekly analyses of upcoming college football action posted at this site. To find out more, please see the Ground Rules. This issue contains the Czar's rankings for all 128 teams in Division I-A football, as well as conference preview capsules, potential upsets to watch for, bowl projections, and a guide to help you...

The Obama administration gave the parents of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl extraordinary insider access to the military’s hunt for their son by having them take part in a series of secure video conferences with senior commanders as well as White House and State Department officials. A former government official involved in American hostage issues said he had never heard of giving a family such access and questioned whether sensitive information could have been conveyed to Robert and Jani Bergdahl and somehow leaked out. A family spokesman said he knows of no such breach. Soon after Sgt. Bergdahl went missing in...

The IRS has notified congressional staff that top officials in the agency’s Affordable Care Act implementation team were recently placed on administrative leave for potential improprieties, according to a congressional source. The agency told lawmakers that Fred Schindler, who is Sarah Hall Ingram’s deputy, and another staffer in the division were put on leave. The move is the result of gifts the staffers allegedly received — including $1,100 in free food and other items — while attending a 2010 health care conference. The IRS didn’t immediately comment. The agency is surrounded in scandal after acknowledging last month that it wrongly...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top official at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service on Thursday acknowledged that it was "embarrassing" how much the tax agency spent on training videos, including a Star Trek spoof, and other lavish expenses during a 2010 conference in California. Faris Fink, commissioner of the agency's small business and self-employed division, told lawmakers the videos, which cost more than $50,000 to produce, were well-intentioned but in hindsight inappropriate. "It's embarrassing. I apologize," said Fink, who played the character Spock in the Star Trek parody that included a tax-themed skit. "I regret the fact that they were made."...

The Internal Revenue Service, already under fire after officials disclosed that the agency targeted conservative groups, faces increased scrutiny because of an inspector general’s report that it spent about $50 million to hold at least 220 conferences for employees between 2010 and 2012.The report by the Treasury Department’s inspector general about conference spending is set to be released Tuesday. The department issued a statement Sunday saying the administration “has already taken aggressive and dramatic action to reduce conference spending.” The White House and the agency were on the defensive before the report on conference spending. Agency officials and the Obama...

Should federal agencies be allowed to hold conferences at taxpayer expense? Yes, but the government needs stricter standards for when to approve them No, never. These conferences are pointless and wasteful Of course. The private sector does it, so why shouldn’t the government?

International political group Hizb ut-Tahrir (logo at left) will be hosting a “Khilafah Conference” in the United Kingdom on July 9th, one that will promote the ideas of a world governed by Islamic law. Now the group just announced that it will host yet another one of those conferences in the Netherlands on July 3rd. (Snip) Though many scoffed at the possibility of a caliphate, it seems that there are many radicals pushing for such a thing. The organization behind the conference, Hizb ut-Tahrir — meaning “Party of Liberation” — is an international political group that seeks to bring about

My daughter is finishing up her 9th grade school year and just got an invitation to go to the National Young Leaders State Conference, put on by the Congressional Youth Leadership Council. The invitation contains lots of marketing information about the conference and the creative looks very expensive, with metallic colored seals and inserts. The conference is in Vienna VA for 4 days and costs about $1400. It names the HS teacher that nominated her for this "honor" and looks personalized. Because of the fee, my first instinct is to dismiss this as a money making scam, with a conference...

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 16 - Last year a Chinese mathematician, Xiaoyun Wang, shook up the insular world of code breakers by exposing a new vulnerability in a crucial American standard for data encryption. On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California. But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend. Although none of the scientists...

A drug developed by Genentech significantly improved the eyesight of people with a condition that is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, the company said yesterday. The results represent the first time that a drug for the disease - age-related macular degeneration - has been able to improve vision, not just preserve it, in a large clinical trial. It thus represents a potentially big advance. "If this pans out, it would be a significant advantage," said Dr. Julia A. Haller, a professor of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University who was involved in the trial and has occasionally consulted...

new Government Accountability report shows that private airport screeners do a better job at detecting dangerous object than the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). This report is the last in a long series, all of which demonstrate the poor performances of the 45,000-employee bureaucracy. So isn't it time for Congress to acknowledge its mistake and abolish TSA? After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Congress ordered all but five commercial airports to switch from privately employed screeners to a government workforce. Three years after the federal takeover, TSA is inundated with complaints. The GAO reported several times on...

BOSTON — So here's the race: the Skipper takes on the Sheriff. (And, of course, the undercard in the fight: Bambi meets Godzilla.) Talk about drowning in metaphor. At least Teresa Heinz Kerry kept her subliminal message simple: She wore a ketchup-red suit to introduce the second senator in her life. Her husband, as usual, went overboard. The Democratic convention, which was focus-group-dial-a- metered to death, needed a dose of dramamine. It was awash in allusions about Commander Kerry steering the ship of state - from the curved design of the metal and wood-paneled lectern, meant to evoke a ship's...

The ACC announced Tuesday that a vote for expansion might not occur until later this month, but regardless of the outcome the Big East is going to be proactive about its future and pursue a 16-team league, a source told ESPN.com. At least one source close to the Big East said the conference wouldn't stand idle waiting to get raided again by the ACC or another league. The source said the Big East cannot remain a fractured 14-team league in basketball and eight teams in football. The financial issues would still be divisive if the league remained as is even...

Five schools filed a lawsuit Friday to try to prevent Miami and Boston College from jumping to the Atlantic Coast Conference, accusing them of secretly taking part in an expansion plan that could ruin the Big East. The lawsuit, filed in state Superior Court in Hartford, Conn., says Miami and Boston College professed loyalty to their conference while concocting a "deliberate scheme to destroy the Big East and abscond with the collective value of all that has been invested and created in the Big East." Big East schools went ahead with millions of dollars in renovations and upgrades under the...

There is still plenty of time to register and make it to Vegas on August 17th! For information and registration, go HERE!