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Politics News
for 01/27/2009

(last updated 7:30am EST 01/27/2009)

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• MADOFF MAY HAVE CHEATED BEFORE HE SWINDL... MADOFF MAY HAVE CHEATED BEFORE HE SWINDLED
01/27/2009
BERNIE Madoff was a cheat before he became a crook. The now infamous alleged perpetrator of a $50 billion Ponzi scheme apparently honed his skills by using his position as head of the little-known Cincinnati Stock Exchange to cheat traders who... (7 h ago)

• SHAREHOLDERS SUE MARVEL SHAREHOLDERS SUE MARVEL
01/27/2009
Marvel Entertainment Inc., maker of the movie "Iron Man," and comic-book creator Stan Lee were sued by Stan Lee Media Inc. stockholders over ownership of assets including "Spider-Man" and "The Incredible Hulk" characters. Shareholders including... (7 h ago)

• CONDO PLAN FOR DIAMOND TOWER CONDO PLAN FOR DIAMOND TOWER
01/27/2009
THE Diamond District's mysteries are many: There's no explaining why two men were trying to sell persimmons - no other fruit, just persimmons - off a sidewalk table on deserted West 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues on the coldest night... (7 h ago)

• TOURADJI CASE INCLUDES BRIBERY CHARGES TOURADJI CASE INCLUDES BRIBERY CHARGES
01/27/2009
A lawsuit filed against hot-shot hedge-fund manager Paul Touradji has taken a nasty turn as a former employee who claims he's owed more than $30 million accuses his ex-boss of bribing another employee to keep him from testifying against Touradji... (7 h ago)

• REED TITLES TAKE A HIT REED TITLES TAKE A HIT
01/27/2009
Reed Business Information sacked 7 percent of its work force, including such titles as Publishers Weekly, Variety and Broadcasting & Cable. Publishers Weekly Editor Sara Nelson - a one-time books columnist at The Post - is among the most... (7 h ago)

• O'S CLOTHIER GOES BROKE O'S CLOTHIER GOES BROKE
01/27/2009
Hartmarx Corp., a Chicago-based maker of men's suits, including President Barack Obama's inauguration tuxedo, has filed for bankruptcy protection. The company, along with 50 affiliates, listed assets of $483 million and debt totaling $261 million... (7 h ago)

• STOLEN E-MAIL MESS STOLEN E-MAIL MESS
01/27/2009
A batch of internal e-mails stolen from American Apparel on Christmas Eve has caught the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, sources told The Post. The SEC has launched a probe into electronic correspondence between executives at... (7 h ago)

• DIGITAL DANCING AT CONDé DIGITAL DANCING AT CONDé
01/27/2009
Condé Nast, long seen as one of the least tech-savvy publishing giants, yesterday said it will consolidate all of its digital units into a single group called Condé Nast Digital. CondéNet boss Sarah Chubb will run the show, putting... (7 h ago)

• SAG GOES BACK TO BICKERING SAG GOES BACK TO BICKERING
01/27/2009
After taking the night off to toast Hollywood and hand out awards, the deeply divided Screen Actors Guild is back to bickering as usual. Yesterday, a majority of SAG's national board, which is split over stalled contract negotiations with the big... (7 h ago)

• IT WAS A PINK-SLIP MONDAY IT WAS A PINK-SLIP MONDAY
01/27/2009
As far as showing up for work on a Monday goes, yesterday was about the worst. In one of the worst-single days ever for widespread layoffs, more than 78,000 workers yesterday got pink-slip notices at global public companies, cutting across almost... (7 h ago)

• SPINNING CLASS SPINNING CLASS
01/27/2009
Disgraced ex-Merrill Lynch chief John Thain went on a p.r. blitzkrieg yesterday defending a reputation in tatters since he was ousted Thursday by Bank of America boss Ken Lewis. In what is turning into a Wall Street version of "he said, he said... (7 h ago)

• END MAY BE NEAR FOR MADOFF-VICTIM TREMON... END MAY BE NEAR FOR MADOFF-VICTIM TREMONT
01/27/2009
Hedge-fund firm Tremont Group Holdings, which lost more than half of its assets to alleged scammer Bernard Madoff, is winding down operations and could shutter its doors by summer, sources tell The Post. The Rye, NY, fund, which is owned by... (7 h ago)

• BUSINESS BRIEFS BUSINESS BRIEFS
01/27/2009
Home sales Sales of previously owned homes in the US unexpectedly rose 6.5 percent to an annual rate of 4.74 million from 4.45 million in November, the National Association of Realtors said yesterday. The median price dropped 15 percent from a... (7 h ago)

• THE FABULOUS FABULIST THE FABULOUS FABULIST
01/27/2009
Gov. Paterson came to his senses yes terday and canceled his junket to this week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. We take full credit. After all, didn't we gently chide His Excellency on the inadvisability of such an adventure on... (7 h ago)

• CITIBOOBS CITIBOOBS
01/27/2009
Citigroup's arrogance is about to fly sky-high. Literally. As The Post reported yesterday, the bank - having wrangled a $45 billion cash handout from US taxpayers, plus another $306 billion in federal guarantees of its assets - now plans to buy... (7 h ago)

• CURLIN REPEATS AS HORSE OF THE YEAR CURLIN REPEATS AS HORSE OF THE YEAR
01/26/2009
Curlin, the four-year-old colt who became the first North American race horse to pass the $10 million mark in earnings when he won last year's Jockey Club Gold Cup, was named repeat Horse of the Year last night at the annual Eclipse Awards dinner... (8 h ago)

• SUTTER CONFIDENT DEVS ARE 'LEGIT' CONTEN... SUTTER CONFIDENT DEVS ARE 'LEGIT' CONTENDERS
01/26/2009
KANATA, Ontario - Initial modesty gave way to pride when Brent Sutter started the post-All Star stretch by calling his Atlantic-leading Devils "legit" contenders. "I let other people worry about those things, if they want to decide whether we're... (8 h ago)

• PALIN'S GOT PAC AND VIP STATUS PALIN'S GOT PAC AND VIP STATUS
01/26/2009
ASK not what Sarah Palin can do for your country, ask only what you can do for Sarah Palin. And the an swer is, pay attention. Trust me, Alaska's governor is moving faster than those glaciers. Traveling with one of her ladies-in-waiting and... (8 h ago)

• INSECURITIES MARKET INSECURITIES MARKET
01/26/2009
WAS it really only eight months ago the city's instantly infamous Fashion Meets Finance party none so subtly attempted to unite low-wage girls who like to shop with Wall Street sugar daddies who like to buy things? In case you missed it the first... (10 h ago)

• DESOLATION CANYON DESOLATION CANYON
01/26/2009
Written STORY SO FAR: Confronting their first real danger on the wild Green River, Aaron and his dad, plunge through raging white water toward a huge boulder. CHAPTER FOUR Water Fights and Mud Wars "High side!" Dad yelled. Our raft was riding... (11 h ago)

• ITE Group Q1 like-for-like sales up 13% ... ITE Group Q1 like-for-like sales up 13% - Update
01/27/2009
News ), an organizer of trade exhibitions and conferences, reported a 13% growth in first-quarter like-for-like sales, and added that trading for the latest quarter was in line with management expecta... (5 h ago)

• German Ifo business confidence index edg... German Ifo business confidence index edges up
01/27/2009
German business confidence improved slightly in January, the closely watched Ifo indicator suggested today, beating market expectations in a rare ray of light for Europe's biggest economy. The Ifo in... (5 h ago)

• Bad news on job front doesn Bad news on job front doesn
01/27/2009
Economists, who on average had already been estimating that January would experience a huge number of job cuts, are now revising their forecasts to include an even bigger number. (6 h ago)

• ISEQ up by 1.27pc as European stocks reb... ISEQ up by 1.27pc as European stocks rebound
01/27/2009
ING Groep reassured investors they are taking steps to stem credit-related losses. Barclays rallied 73pc after saying "record revenue" will cover writedowns. ING climbed 28pc on plans to slash costs b... (6 h ago)

• No relief in sight for merchants in No relief in sight for merchants in
01/27/2009
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- If 2008 was brutal for retailers' sales, 2009 will be just as turbulent, or even worse, according to an industry forecast Tuesday.Retail industry sales - excluding those log... (6 h ago)

• To Test or Not to Test To Test or Not to Test
01/27/2009
The recent trends in the financial markets remain in place, with the major indices still in downtrends on multiple time frames and setting up what appears to be a crucial price test of their bear mark... (6 h ago)

• Oracle Financial net profit doubles at R... Oracle Financial net profit doubles at Rs 263 cr
01/27/2009
Oracle Financial Services Software’s (formerly known as i-flex) net profit more than doubled for the third quarter ended December 31, 2008 to touch Rs 263 crore, from Rs 106.6 crore in the corre... (6 h ago)

• Japan to inject public funds into compan... Japan to inject public funds into companies
01/27/2009
Japan will provide public funds to companies to help them through the global economic crisis, widening a rescue plan beyond the banking sector, the trade and industry ministry said today. (6 h ago)

• Storm Financial collapse not my fault, s... Storm Financial collapse not my fault, says boss
01/27/2009
fist time since the company was wound up by administrators. Storm customers, who face losing their homes and life savings, will gather in Townsville (6 h ago)

• Janet Jackson cancels Japan tour due to ... Janet Jackson cancels Japan tour due to global "economic crisis"
01/26/2009
Washington, Jan 27 : R and B singer Janet Jackson has postponed the Japanese leg of her tour, with promoters blaming the global financial crisis. (8 h ago)

• Males chimps have best buddies just like... Males chimps have best buddies just like men
01/26/2009
London, Jan 27 : Just like humans, chimpanzees too need a best friend, says a new study, which has found that adult male chimps form enduring social bonds with other males, exchanging back scratches, sharing meat, and generally chumming around. (8 h ago)

• Senate confirms Obama pick as treasury s... Senate confirms Obama pick as treasury secretary despite tax problems
01/26/2009
Washington, Jan 27 (IANS) The US Senate has confirmed Timothy F. Geithner, President Barack Obama's pick as the next treasury secretary to head his administration's response to the financial crisis threatening economic growth around the globe. (10 h ago)

• Tokyo stocks rebound on bargain hunting Tokyo stocks rebound on bargain hunting
01/26/2009
Stocks ended Tuesday morning trading higher in Tokyo as investors bought back battered shares after the benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average hit a three-month low the previous day. (10 h ago)

• Global financial crisis weighs on Brazil... Global financial crisis weighs on Brazilian carnival
01/26/2009
The global financial crisis will be felt this year at Brazil's Carnival due to the reduction in sponsorships for samba schools. (10 h ago)

• US stocks gain despite job cuts, buoyed ... US stocks gain despite job cuts, buoyed by Pfizer deal
01/26/2009
A volatile session on Wall Street ended higher Monday, the markets buoyed by news of a $68-billion deal between pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc and its competitor Wyeth. (14 h ago)

• Former Deutsche Post boss escapes jail f... Former Deutsche Post boss escapes jail for tax evasion
01/26/2009
A disgraced German business leader was given a suspended prison sentence Monday for evading tax on funds hidden in the Alpine principality of Liechtenstein. (20 h ago)

• Broad based rally on Wall Street Broad based rally on Wall Street
01/26/2009
Stocks were consistently higher throughout Monday, with all indices advancing solidly. (22 h ago)

• Indian infrastructure firm opens London ... Indian infrastructure firm opens London office to tap European finance
01/26/2009
Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS), one of India's leading infrastructure development and finance companies, Monday opened a London office to tap European channels of financing. (23 h ago)

• Gordon Ramsay facing nightmare over &pou... Gordon Ramsay facing nightmare over £10M business loan
01/26/2009
London, Jan 26 : Brit celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is said to be facing financial crisis, with sources claiming that the troubled Royal Bank of Scotland is calling in their 10million pounds business loan to him. (1 d ago)

• Broke Ronnie Wood Broke Ronnie Wood
01/26/2009
London, January 26 : Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood has reportedly hired a new team of attorneys to work out his financial worries. (1 d ago)

• Video: Daffodils Wander Lonely as a Clou... Video: Daffodils Wander Lonely as a Cloud, in 'Flower'
01/26/2009
In February, thatgamecompany will release Flower, a "videogame version of a poem" for PlayStation 3. Flower lets the player explore the dreams of city blooms trapped in urban decay that long to caress the soft grasses of the countryside. (11 h ago)

• Get a Clue: Top Crossword Solver Throws ... Get a Clue: Top Crossword Solver Throws Down Geeky Challenge
01/26/2009
Tyler Hinman 's life changed in ninth grade, when a teacher gave him a crossword puzzle to pass the time in study hall. Hinman, now 24, went on to become the Tiger Woods of word games, winning the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament for the past four years. His feverish solving skills leave rivals—and us—dumbstruck. (Search his name on YouTube and you'll find a clip of him tearing through a Monday New York Times puzzle in just over two minutes.) He's also our kind of guy: Hinman earned a degree in IT from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and since June has been flexing his coding knowledge at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. "There's a large group of puzzle people here in the Bay Area," he says. "They're all smart. As Will Shortz is fond of saying, not all smart people solve crosswords, but all crossword solvers are smart." Hinman is gearing up for a possible five-peat at this year's tourney, starting February 27. To help him get in top form, we asked him to create an extra-special crossword (with a geeky twist). Data Corruption A puzzle by Tyler Hinman Instructions A computer virus infected this puzzle while I was making it, causing some corruption. Answers for eight of the Across clues are a single letter off from the real ones (which are all common, uncapitalized words). In addition, one letter was changed in eight of the Down clues. Circle the faulty Down letters as you work through the puzzle. When you're done, read those incorrect letters in order to uncover another virus I could come down with. Then circle the letters that were victimized in the Across answers and read them all row by row from top to bottom to spell out something that might help protect me from that virus. Clues Tyler Hinman tears through a New York Times crossword puzzle in two and a half minutes. Video courtesy Chris Barrett Across 1 "My ___ ran over my dogma" (punny bumper sticker) 6 Cuts into cubes 11 Place to get pampered 14 Shows age, maybe 15 It's symbolized by a crescent and star 16 What some suffer for 17 He passed Aaron in August 2007 18 It may be high-speed 19 Certainly not a smash 20 Nemeses 22 1999 virus that wreaked havoc on email systems 24 Videogame genre 28 Hiker's path 29 22-Across or 4-Down 30 Convert the decimal number 2 to binary and read the result as a decimal number 31 Believers in an indifferent God 32 1996 Olympic torch lighter 33 Firs' relatives 35 Countrywide: Abbr. 37 Early PC virus, also called Pakistani 38 Hula hoop supporters 42 Word before borealis or australis 44 Sweet ___ (baseball nickname) 45 "Can't get out of this one" 48 Frequent Wile E. Coyote tool 50 One of Monty Hall's three 51 Hawaiian entertainer who had 10 children 52 Setting for a [31-Down] Brown book 54 The first computer virus, which infected Arpanet 56 Actress Blanchett 57 Plus 58 Formal self-identification 61 Greet casually 64 Not plus or premium: Abbr. 65 Where antiques are often found 66 How anchovies are packed 67 Dr. ___ 68 Lookin' sharp 69 Performed terribly Down 1 Putin's former grp. 2 Former spokesman Fleischer 3 Fled from the cops, say 4 In 2004, it became the fastest-spreading email virus ever 5 Hood thing 6 Old ___ (historic London theater) 7 "Eh, kinda" 8 It gets a grip 9 Lighten up 10 It extracts ore 11 Dies for chips 12 A toast 13 Walks aren't considered official ones 21 Goad to go 23 South Bend team 24 Beautiful creature, in a fairy tale 25 Child greeting 26 It might carry a virus 27 Dig up 31 See 52-Across 34 Cheers character replaced by Rebecca 36 Wood chop tool 37 Victoria's Secret order 39 2000 virus written in VBScript 40 Pretty bod 41 "Sounds good" 43 Perfect, as a society 45 What a bouncer checks 46 More like a slasher film 47 Tense 49 Group that Weird Al parodied in "Phony Calls" 50 Any one of the X-Men 52 Country star Travis 53 Place to find later 55 It blows in Sicily 59 Command for Dover 60 Like a hailstorm 62 Sot's sound 63 Variety Meet the King of Crosswords Tyler Hinman is a crossword wunderkind. The 24-year-old Google software designer is a four-time winner of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament . (His first victory, in the 2005 tourney, is recorded in the gripping documentary Wordplay . ) Wired commissioned Tyler to create a crossword with a tech twist and interviewed him as he prepared to go to the 2009 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, where he may score an unprecedented fifth win. How did you get started with crossword puzzles? Ten years ago, a teacher gave me a NY Times crossword to do in study hall. What was it about crosswords that hooked you? It ties into why I like puzzles in general — the thought of bringing order to something. Photo: Nancy Shack, courtesy the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament Since graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, you have gone on to work at Google. What do you do there? I'm an online operations associate. I make internal tools. When do you do puzzles these days? Usually on the bus ride to and from work in Mountain View. Do you work other crosswords besides the one in the New York Times ? I do the Atlantic Monthly 's Cryptic Crossword. I used to do the USA Today puzzle before realizing that I didn't like it much. The New York Sun had a very good puzzle. That paper has folded, but the rest of its puzzles — several months' worth — may continue as an online subscription service. When did you start competing in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament? In 2001, when I was 16. I did decently...like 101st out of 310. What did it feel like when you won the tournament in 2005, becoming the youngest winner ever? There was elation, a little bit of disbelief. It was a nice feather in my cap, but it didn't change my approach. You've won every year since then. What's your goal for this year's contest? Just to have fun. I never really expect to win. I get nervous...but I do my best solving at the tournament. (11 h ago)

• Jan. 27, 1967: 3 Astronauts Die in Capsu... Jan. 27, 1967: 3 Astronauts Die in Capsule Fire
01/26/2009
1967: Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee are killed on the launch pad when a flash fire engulfs their command module during testing for the first Apollo/Saturn mission. They are the first U.S. astronauts to die in the line of duty. The command module, built by North American Aviation , was the prototype for those that would eventually accompany the lunar landers to the moon. Designated CM-012 by NASA, the module was a lot larger than those flown during the Mercury and Gemini programs, and was the first designed for the Saturn 1B booster. Even before tragedy struck, the command module was criticized for a number of potentially hazardous design flaws, including the use of a more combustible, 100 percent oxygen atmosphere in the cockpit, an escape hatch that opened inward instead of outward, faulty wiring and plumbing, and the presence of flammable material. Regarding the cabin atmosphere and hatch configuration, it was a case of NASA overruling the recommendations of the North American designers. North American proposed using a 60-40 oxygen/nitrogen mixture but because of fears over decompression sickness, and because pure oxygen had been used successfully in earlier space programs, NASA insisted on it being used again. NASA also dinged the suggestion that the hatch open outward and carry explosive bolts in case of an emergency mainly because a hatch failure in the Mercury program's Friendship 7 capsule had nearly killed Gus Grissom in 1961. So CM-012 was completed as ordered and delivered to Cape Canaveral. The three astronauts knew they were looking at a potential death trap. Not long before he died, Grissom plucked a lemon from a tree at his house and told his wife, "I'm going to hang it on that spacecraft." The test on Jan. 27 was a "plugs-out" launch simulation designed to see if the Apollo spacecraft could operate on internal power only. It was considered a non-hazardous test. Several problems delayed the beginning of the test until evening. Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were strapped into their seats when a voltage fluctuation occurred. Grissom was heard shouting "Fire!" and White followed immediately with "We've got a fire in the cockpit." It was all over in 30 seconds, perhaps the longest half-minute in NASA's history. Pandemonium broke out as the capsule filled with flames and toxic smoke, and Chaffee could be heard yelling, "Let's get out! We've got a bad fire! We're burning up!" Screaming was heard before the communications cut out. The command module ruptured. Rescuers were prevented by the flames, and by toxic fumes — their gas masks were faulty — from opening the hatch for a full five minutes, and in any case the idea of rescue was futile. The three astronauts were roasted alive. It took seven hours to remove the bodies. Each had severe third-degree burns and the flames were so intense that the space suits of Grissom and White were fused together. Investigators determined that the cabin pressure at the time of the fire would have prevented the hatch from being opened, even if White, the astronaut charged with operating the hatch in an emergency, had been able to reach it. Although the exact cause of the fire has never been determined, a review board concluded that the combustible material inside the module almost certainly contributed to its severity. As a result of the tragedy, the Apollo command module underwent a thorough redesign. Grissom and Chaffee are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. White is buried at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Source: NASA, Wikipedia (11 h ago)

• Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on ... Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap
01/26/2009
Several dozen conference-goers are filing into the Mendocino Room of the Embassy Suites Hotel in Burlingame, a San Francisco suburb, arming themselves with coffee and muffins as they shuffle to their seats. It's the kind of scene that occurs daily—if not hourly—in the Bay Area, where techies and businesspeople forever squeeze into drab meeting rooms to discuss how they are going to change the world. But even by local standards, the attendees gathered here are chasing a dream so grand and exotic it makes the typical Internet confab look like an OSHA seminar. Anyone can build a game-changing social-network platform or a virtual community or a set of open APIs. But the people here want to start a nonmetaphorical revolution by creating their own independent nations. In the middle of the ocean. On prefab floating platforms. At 9:12 am, Patri Friedman stands up to address the group. A former Google software engineer, Friedman is 32 but comes off much younger, with close-cropped hair and a slightly nasal voice. He is executive director of the Seasteading Institute , the nonprofit he founded in April 2008, and this is the group's first major event. He surveys the room, taking in a cross section of Silicon Valley culture: A white-haired nanotech millionaire in a suit sits next to a grad student in a Transformers T-shirt. If you were to break down the audience into high school classifications, you'd find a couple of hippies and goths, a few hipsters, and several preppies. The rest would definitely be at the nerd table. The male-female ratio is 7 to 1. "This isn't enough to create a whole new civilization," Friedman says. "But this is a seed." The morning sessions from the first annual Seasteading conference, held in Burlingame California on October 10th. Friedman and his followers are not the first band of wide-eyed dreamers to want to build floating utopias. For decades, an assortment of romantics and whack jobs have fantasized about fleeing the oppressive strictures of modern government and creating a laissez-faire society on the high seas. Over the decades, they've tried everything from fortified sandbars to mammoth cruise ships. Nearly all have been disasters. But the would-be nation builders assembled here are not intimidated by that record of failure. After all, their plans are inspired by the ethos of the modern tech industry, where grand quixotic visions are as common as BlackBerrys, and they see their task not as a holy mission but as something like a startup. A couple of software engineers came up with an innovative concept, then outsourced it to a community and let the wisdom of the crowd improve on it. They scored financing from a top-tier venture capitalist and assembled a board of directors. They will be transparent, blogging their progress. If they fail—which, let's face it, is the most likely outcome—they will do so quickly, in time-honored Valley fashion. But if they succeed, they have one hell of an exit strategy. Friedman launches into what he calls "my standard rant"—a spiel about government's shortcomings and why they're so hard to repair. In his eyes, government is a sclerotic monopoly that can count on high customer lock-in thanks to inertia and the lack of alternatives. "Government is an inefficient industry because it has an insane barrier to entry," he says. "To compete with governments on existing land, you have to win a war, an election, or a revolution." He points to the democracy that emerged from the American Revolution as the last successful rollout and attributes the subsequent dry spell to the lack of uncolonized space on the map. "We've run out of frontier," he says. But there's still one virgin realm left, and it covers 70 percent of the earth's surface. The purpose of the Seasteading Institute—and of this gathering—is to figure out how to make aquatic homesteads a reality. But Friedman doesn't just want to create huge floating platforms that people can live on. He's also hoping to create a platform in the sense that Linux is a platform: a base upon which people can build their own innovative forms of governance. The ultimate goal is to create standards and blueprints that can be easily adapted, allowing small communities to rapidly incubate and test new models of self-rule with the same ease that a programmer in his garage can whip up a Facebook app. "You could roll your own government out of pieces copied from all the societies around you," Friedman says. "Google set my standards for how fast something should grow. This has potential to exceed those standards—if we make one seastead, there's room for thousands." Your Home Away From... Everything! You're ready to move to the middle of the ocean. What will your new digs look like? The Seasteading Institute hired Marine Innovation & Technology, an oil rig designer, to sketch out a $50 million, 20,000-ton platform with multistory living quarters and helipads. 1// Living Platform The 160,000-square-foot steel expanse puts the cruise ship lido deck to shame. Carbon-fiber cables anchored to the pillars reinforce the structure and make possible a larger platform surface. 2// Water Supply Water, water everywhere—and plenty for you to drink! Desalination equipment provides potable freshwater and gray water for gardening. 3// Foot Tanks Leave the Dramamine ashore. Water tanks inside four flotation pillars hold the seastead 30 feet above water and minimize the impact of rogue waves. 4// Engine Room Don't like your neighbors? Move! The island can travel at speeds of up to 2 knots, powered by four diesel engines that double as electrical generators. Illustration: Kate Francis Friedman's optimism is easier to buy into if you ignore the history of previous would-be nation builders. There was Operation Atlantis , created by Ayn Rand admirer Werner Stiefel in the late 1960s. Stiefel, who made a fortune selling dermatology products, devoted his life to creating a sovereign society with the freest markets imaginable. He started with a ferro-cement boat that made a single successful voyage on the Hudson River. He erected a system of seabreaks near the coast of Haiti but was run off by president Franè7ois Duvalier's gunboats before he could put land on it. He bought an oil rig and tried to anchor it between Cuba and Honduras, where it was destroyed by a storm. Stiefel died in 2006 with little more than a sporadically published newsletter to show for his efforts. In 1971, real estate millionaire and committed libertarian Michael Oliver dumped large quantities of sand on two coral reefs in the South Pacific and dubbed it the Republic of Minerva , a land with "no taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism." Minerva was soon invaded by the nearby kingdom of Tonga, and it dissolved back into the ocean shortly thereafter. The Oceania city project , a plan for a vast floating settlement off the coast of Panama, emerged in 1993. The founders took out a two-page ad in Reason , a libertarian magazine, promising to free prospective residents from governments "entangled in bureaucracy, corruption, and the free lunch philosophy." The project was disbanded the following year due to lack of interest and funds. "The Libertarian party is small in number and too few members have the financial resources to bankroll their beliefs," founder Eric Klien wrote on Oceania's Web site . Other projects still exist as hypothetical concepts. There's the Freedom Ship , a mile-long floating tax haven, which will come into being just as soon as its organizers can drum up the $10 billion needed to build it. (They've accused their former president of absconding with the first $400,000 they raised.) The concept of failed aquatic libertarian havens has even entered the pop consciousness, providing the setting for the blockbuster videogame BioShock . Wayne Gramlich will never move to the middle of the ocean—his wife forbids it. But when the former software engineer, who has been "on sabbatical" since the late 1990s, stumbled across the Oceania Web site about a decade ago, he was both enthralled by the vision and dismayed at the execution. An early Sun Microsystems employee who worked on browser security at the dawn of the World Wide Web, he thought what was needed was a dispassionate perspective—a realistic plan to build floating autonomous countries. "Oceania had a lot of pretty pictures, pretty concept art, but that was it," he says. In 1998 he wrote a modest proposal , SeaSteading—Homesteading on the High Seas , to get beyond the grandiloquence. "Big and expensive projects will have a very difficult time attracting the requisite capital," Gramlich wrote. An engineer at heart, he tried to devise a way to build islands on the cheap. His report outlined how thousands of empty 2-liter soda bottles could be used to create a floating platform. That sounded like paradise to Friedman when he saw the paper on Gramlich's site. He had always been interested in big-picture socioeconomic theories. The son of libertarian legal theorist David Friedman and grandson of the Nobel Prize-winning free-market economist Milton Friedman , Patri had until then expressed his worldview mainly through his lifestyle: engaging in "radical self-expression" at Burning Man, experimenting with drugs, living in intentional communities with several other families, and maintaining a polyamorous relationship with his wife. His BMW 328i has a customized license plate: FRRREAK. Friedman had read about money holes like Oceania and considered them too fantastical to bother with. But the relative practicality of Gramlich's ideas appealed to the software engineer in him. Here was a simple kludge for a floating platform that might be affordable. And if it could work, Friedman would love to be among the first settlers to live on the open sea. "My dad and grandfather write about stuff," he says. "What interests me is doing something." He sent an email to Gramlich, and the two discovered that they lived a few miles apart in Sunnyvale, California. In late 2001, they began to collaborate on a new paper on seasteading. They posted everything online, including their notes to each other. (Friedman coded a Perl script that would allow anyone to submit comments on each paragraph.) Over the next couple of years, Friedman and Gramlich assembled a 150-page book on the logistics of seasteading. Their guidelines were intensely pragmatic, explaining everything from how to fend off barnacles (a "continuous discharge of low-level chlorination") to how to fend off foreign navies ("sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missiles like the Chinese Silkworm are fairly cheap and quite effective"). They described the least far-fetched, least expensive design for a safe seastead they could find—the floating spar. The hypothetical dwelling looks like a giant dumbbell standing on end, with a large steel ballast underwater and a 48,000-square-foot platform suspended above, where 120 people could live. They estimated it could be built for about $3 million. "That's the same price as a nice house in San Francisco," Friedman says. (Their design has since evolved, as shown at above.) Gramlich and Friedman's online tome captured the imagination of like-minded geeks, who peppered it with suggestions and criticisms. It was also brought to the attention of millionaire tech investor Peter Thiel , who shared Friedman and Gramlich's dissatisfaction with land-bound governments. Thiel was a cofounder of PayPal, and he viewed that company as a way to further his libertarian ideals—a way to move money around the world as 1s and 0s without the involvement of nations or their currencies. After selling PayPal to eBay and walking away with a reported $55 million, Thiel started the hedge fund Clarium Capital , which made a fortune earlier this decade by correctly betting that oil prices would rise and the dollar would weaken. Thiel has invested in Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Slide. He has also donated $3.5 million to Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Foundation , which seeks to extend longevity, and given money to the campaigns of small-government conservatives like Ron Paul. "Peter wants to end the inevitability of death and taxes," Friedman says. "I mean, talk about aiming high!" Last April, Thiel pledged a $500,000 investment and installed his right-hand man, Joe Lonsdale , as chair of the Seasteading Institute. "Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that seasteading was an obvious step toward encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world," Thiel said in a statement at the time . Three months after the wire transfer went through, Friedman left his job at Google. Friedman is quick to acknowledge that not everyone will share his vision. "At first blush, this all sounds kind of crazy, and to see the potential beyond that—that's pretty awesome," he tells his fellow enthusiasts at the seasteading conference. "There's a lot of good craziness in this room!" The afternoon sessions from the first annual Seasteading conference, held in Burlingame California on October 10th. But good craziness alone will not make seasteads work, and most of the day is spent discussing the nuts and bolts of creating a floating community. First is the question of structure. "The ocean is a harsh and corrosive environment," Friedman says. In addition to rust and barnacles, there's wave motion, which is disorienting in the best of times and potentially fatal during a storm. The Seasteading Institute hired Marine Innovation & Technology as a consultant to solve these problems. Naval architect Alexia Aubault takes the lectern to describe the results of wave-motion analyses her engineering firm performed. To protect the organization from frivolous infringement lawsuits, she is barred by the institute's lawyer from showing off the refined design until a patent gets filed. (That has since been done.) And that's just one of the legal torpedoes that seasteaders must dodge. According to the UN's Law of the Sea , the jurisdiction of traditional nations extends up to 200 miles from shore, an exclusive economic zone within which countries can control fishing and mineral rights and police polluters. Friedman hopes there will someday be self-sufficient seasteads that can thrive on the high seas, beyond the purview of any country. But for the near future, he concedes, they'll probably need to remain near shore and operate like cruise ships, which are bound by the laws of the country where they're registered. Most governments won't attack these kinds of vessels as long as they behave. "At this point, it matters who you piss off," he says. ( Raymond Peck , a former Reagan administration official, has agreed to do further research for the institute on the Law of the Sea.) At 11 am, attendees break up into small groups to brainstorm business models. Seasteaders can depend on like-minded benefactors for only so long. Ultimately, these nations will need to pay the bills. Friedman notes that some enterprises—like euthanasia clinics—would incense local authorities, but almost all the ideas attendees come up with would capitalize on activities that skirt existing laws and regulations: Fish farming and aquaculture. Prisons . Med schools. Gold warehouses . Brothels . Cryonics intakes. Gene therapy, cloning, augmentation, and organ sales. Baby farms. Deafeningly loud concerts. Rehab/detox clinics. Zen retreats . Abortion clinics . Ultimate ultimate fighting tournaments. During the Seasteading conference, Vince Cate showed video of a floating prototype of his own design: The WaterWalker , a tripod lashed to three soccer balls. (Lonsdale has his own ideas. "Bazooka bikini bachelor parties," he says. "You get there and a Lithuanian model hands you a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.") But in the end, the seasteaders may face an even more fundamental challenge. During an afternoon session, Friedman asks, "How many people here know how to sail?" Few hands go up. He says plans are under way to offer group instruction at discount rates. The first annual seasteading conference adjourns at 6 pm. A kayaking trip around the bohemian houseboat community just off Sausalito has been scheduled for the following morning, but it is canceled because of high winds. Forbes Island isn't really an island at all but a 5,000-square-foot, 700-ton sea vehicle decked out with palm trees, a white-sand beach, and a lighthouse. A houseboat designer named Forbes Kiddoo , inspired by the science fiction of Jules Verne, spent five years building it. In 1999, he converted it into a restaurant that today floats near San Francisco's kitschy Pier 39, serving $35 rack of lamb to tourists who watch sea lions flop around on the nearby docks. Tonight, the eatery is hosting the Seasteading Institute's post-conference dinner. Kiddoo himself ferries the seasteaders from shore to restaurant in a tiny pontoon boat. On the way over, he explains that obtaining clearance for his island was a nightmare. "I had to get city, county, state, and federal permits," he says, shouting to be heard over the bellowing of sea lions. "I had to deal with the ADA, the ABC ... I had to become a merchant marine captain." Houseboat designer Forbes Kiddoo gives a tour of his manmade island. The structure, now converted into a restaurant, was host to the Seasteading Institute's post-conference dinner last October. Afterward, in the island's bar, Friedman seems happy with how the event went, though he says some of his plans will have to be scaled back. He had wanted to hold a floating festival dubbed Ephemerisle on Fourth of July weekend; it was to be a sort of Burning Man on the high seas, where everything is permitted. But several conference attendees expressed concern about the logistics —and advisability —of a free-floating bacchanal of guns and drugs. He'll still host some sort of gathering to test a few miniature floating-island prototypes but expects it to be held in San Francisco Bay, not out on the open sea. "It'll probably take a few iterations to get there," he says. "But at least we're doing something." Eventually, the seasteaders move to the Tahiti Room, which has a lovely moonlit view of Alcatraz. Chatter around the table gets louder as the wine flows, but the subject matter remains wonky. "The interesting issues are social and legal," says Mikolaj Habryn , a site reliability engineer at Google. "You'll get slavery. You'll get drug dealing. Maybe there'll be polygamous Mormons. The first people involved will inevitably be those who want to do things they can't do on land, and we have to deal with that." A ship passes, and even though Forbes Island is firmly moored a few hundred feet from shore and separated from the bay by a breakwater, the restaurant sways so much that some diners have to breathe deeply and focus on the horizon to settle their stomachs. At the other end of the table, Patri Friedman raises his glass to make a toast. "I want to see us all at the 10th Annual Seasteading Conference," he says, implying that he expects it to take place on an actual seastead, not in an Embassy Suites or a floating theme restaurant. "It'll be in a bigger room, there will be a better view, it won't move up and down as much, and there'll be a better wine selection and better things to smoke!" Friedman is joined by a raucous round of toasts. "To Peter Thiel for financing this!" "To having more women here!" "To being on the water!" "To freedom!" Friedman wraps it up: "To being crazy in a good way!" Senior editor Chris Baker ( chris_baker@wired.com ) wrote about Star Wars continuity in issue 16.09. (11 h ago)

• Mr. Know-It-All: Hi-Def Etiquette, Faceb... Mr. Know-It-All: Hi-Def Etiquette, Facebook Friends-in-Law, Wiki Errors
01/26/2009
My only friend without an HDTV has invited me to his Super Bowl party. Hi-def sets have gotten pretty cheap. Is it rude to ask him to upgrade? Building bridges that can withstand anything. Ask away, but remember that in these financially brutal times, even the gainfully employed are living lean. You might soften your approach and start by inviting your pal over to witness hi-def sports in all their glory. (You do have an HDTV yourself, right?) Maybe he'll see the light and pony up for an HD rig right before the big game. He wouldn't be the first. But if your friend still resists dropping the cash, don't back out on his shindig. Yes, it's tough to revert to standard-def fuzz if you're accustomed to seeing every blade of grass. But, come on—has the splendor of all those pixels really made you that antisocial? The attraction of the party should be camaraderie, not the quality of the screen. Joseph Whip of TVPredictions.com puts it well: "While I love HD, I do prefer friendship and human interaction." Plan on soothing the pain by knocking back a few extra beers before kickoff. Once the cheering starts, your technological hang-ups will be quickly forgotten. When her mother recently friended me on Facebook, my girlfriend freaked and demanded that I defriend Mom at once. Should I comply or hold firm and risk hurting our relationship? Your darling's dismay seems excessive, but you need to gather some intelligence before taking a stand. There could be a painful backstory here—an instance, perhaps, in which maternal interference ruined a promising romance. Ask your girlfriend if her reaction is due to past meddling. If she has a tragic tale to relate, reassure her that you won't stand for such shenanigans. Make it clear that you'll instantly defriend Mom if she starts getting up to her old nosy tricks. A Facebook message with the subject line "Wedding Plans?" Buh-bye. But the request might have less to do with Mom's misdeeds than a feeling that parental presence sucks the fun out of Facebook. "Using Facebook is a little like going to a party, and who wants to go to a party where their mom is standing in the corner?" says E. A. Vander Veer , author of Facebook: The Missing Manual . By accepting Mrs. Girlfriend into your inner circle, you tacitly agreed to keep things on your profile rated G—or at least PG-13. Your gal simply may not relish the prospect of censoring her Wall posts to you. If that's the essence of the gripe, gently resist her demand. Explain that preserving your right to Facebook raunchiness isn't worth hurting her mother's feelings. And point out that, hey, it's only Facebook—it's not like you let Mom install a webcam in your bedroom. There's a serious error in the Wikipedia entry on me—they totally botched my birthplace. I want to correct the mistake, but I know you're not supposed to edit your own entry. What to do? Congratulations on being deemed notable enough to merit a Wikipedia article. This implies that there are independent news sources out there with biographical information about you. Do these pieces have your birthplace correct? If so, create a note on your entry's Talk page with links to this evidence; with any luck, a Wikipedia contributor will notice it and make the necessary fix. If time is of the essence and you seriously believe the fate of the free world hangs in the balance, go ahead and edit the entry yourself. Just be sure to record everything on the Talk page, to avoid charges of sock puppetry. Be ready, however, for some back-and-forth if the article's creator has a source for the misinformation. If this contributor won't relent, drop an email to info-en-q@wikimedia.org and explain the situation. Be brief and provide links to reputable sources that have accurate data. In a worst-case scenario, the erroneous birthplace may have been bouncing around the World Wide Echo Chamber for so long that no linkable news articles have it right. "In cases like this, we suggest individuals try to correct the sources rather than insert unsourced information to our project," says Cary Bass , volunteer coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. That means your beef isn't with whoever created your Wikipedia entry but with the lazy journalists who've been flubbing your life's story all along. Rain your fury upon them. Need help navigating life in the 21st century? Email us at mrknowitall@wiredmag.com . (11 h ago)

• Climate Change Could Choke Oceans for 10... Climate Change Could Choke Oceans for 100,000 Years
01/26/2009
Climate change could alter the ocean so drastically that it would be oxygen depleted for 100,000 years, reducing its ability to sustain fish. (17 h ago)

• NSA Whistleblower: Grill the CEOs on Ill... NSA Whistleblower: Grill the CEOs on Illegal Spying
01/26/2009
Did credit card companies voluntarily share consumer transaction records with the National Security Agency on a massive scale? Former NSA analyst Russell Tice says bank and credit card industry CEOs should be called to answer in Congress. (17 h ago)

• March of Penguins Turning Into Trail of ... March of Penguins Turning Into Trail of Tears
01/26/2009
Emperor penguin populations could face near extinction if global warming continues to shrink their sea ice habitat. (18 h ago)

• Baby Got Beat: Music May Be Inborn Baby Got Beat: Music May Be Inborn
01/26/2009
Babies' brains have the same reaction to musical beats that adult brains do, suggesting that a feel for music is innate. Previously, scientists suspected musical understanding was an offshoot of language that was learned in the first few months after birth. (18 h ago)

• WTF? A Gaming Notebook That Costs Under ... WTF? A Gaming Notebook That Costs Under a Grand
01/26/2009
Think you have to sell a kidney just to afford a top-notch gaming notebook? You don't. King of cheap laptops, MSI, offers its GX630, a gaming lappy that costs under a thousand bucks. (18 h ago)

• 'Rogue' Googlephone App Raises Questions... 'Rogue' Googlephone App Raises Questions About Android's Open Policy
01/26/2009
An Android phone app that claims to optimize use of the memory on HTC's G1 phones has drawn the ire of some G1 users who allege it's a rogue application capable of wiping the data off the phone and sending spam to contacts. (19 h ago)

• How to Repaint a Plane in 3 Minutes How to Repaint a Plane in 3 Minutes
01/26/2009
It took Delta Air Lines 12 days to repaint one of its 747s. Time-lapse video condenses it to three minutes and change. (20 h ago)

• Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 ... Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 Ready for the Masses
01/26/2009
Microsoft's next web browser, Internet Explorer 8, reaches its final stage before completion. The company announces the availability of IE8 Release Candidate 1, a "feature-complete" version of the browser due the first half of this year. (20 h ago)

• Surprise! The New F1 Cars Aren't Ugly Surprise! The New F1 Cars Aren't Ugly
01/26/2009
A new season brings new rules and a new look for the cars, which, despite one key problem, look great. (20 h ago)

• NASA Going to the Dark Side ... of the S... NASA Going to the Dark Side ... of the Sun
01/26/2009
A pair of NASA satellites will start transmitting views of the far side of the sun in 2011, giving scientists their first simultaneous view of both sides of the star. The 270-degree picture could help with predictions of solar storms that can disturb airlines and communications and potentially harm astronauts. (21 h ago)

• Obama Pushing Stronger Fuel-Efficiency S... Obama Pushing Stronger Fuel-Efficiency Standard
01/26/2009
President Barack Obama orders the government Monday to re-examine whether California and other states should be allowed to have tougher auto emission standards, a clean break from Bush administration policy. (23 h ago)

• Delay in Analog TV Shutdown Presents Cha... Delay in Analog TV Shutdown Presents Challenges
01/26/2009
Congress appears ready to delay the Feb. 17 switchover to digital TV, with more than 6.5 million households thought not to be ready. But that could bring its own problems. (1 d ago)

• 10 iPhone Games You Must Own 10 iPhone Games You Must Own
01/26/2009
These cheap, simple diversions will turn your Apple phone (or your iPod Touch) into an entertainment powerhouse. (1 d ago)

• Playlist: Ocean Atlas, Dead Dudes on Twi... Playlist: Ocean Atlas, Dead Dudes on Twitter, Jonathan Coulton, RjDj
01/25/2009
: The National Geographic Society's giant coffee-table book catalogs and analyzes almost every drop of salt water that ebbs and flows over two-thirds of our planet. The collection features 100-plus beautifully rendered maps of seafloors, currents, surface temperatures, and political boundaries. Dive into stunning photographs of underwater life and essays from people with surnames like Cousteau and Sagan. Beware: Once you start this fascinating voyage, you may get lost at sea. : Spoiling for an argument ? Brushing up on your silly walks ? Pining for the fjords ? Monty Python's new YouTube channel can help. It may not be exhaustive, but as a response to rogue uploaders, this trove of dozens of high-quality clips is a hell of a lot classier than a cease-and-desist letter. : It's hard to tell if a Twitter feed from a famous musician is legit or merely the work of a label flack. One dead giveaway: when the tweeter is no longer living. Following the feeds of deceased artists (or at least their die-hard fans) is like visiting old friends. Kurt Cobain ( @kurdtcobain ) laments the antics of Courtney Love, while Biggie Smalls ( @NotoriousBIG ) fields disses from Tupac Shakur ( @PacIsAlive ). : We got hooked on this hirsute ex-programmer after he uploaded his take on Sir Mix-A-Lot's " Baby Got Back " to the interwebs in 2005. Rocking 20 tracks, including many that debuted on his song-a-week podcast, this live DVD captures JoCo belting out lyrics about delirious coders, Ikea, and why Pluto's moon Charon will always love the despondent former planet. Awww. : Tune in and trip out with RjDj , an iPhone music app that transforms ambient noises into ear-bending soundscapes. The clattering of keyboards, the rumble of buses, even the ins and outs of your breath are multiplied, pitch-shifted, looped, and twisted on the fly into an aural mosaic. It's like taking a leisurely walk inside Brian Eno's brain. : Eighty years after explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared while searching for a mythical lost city in the Amazon, New Yorker staff writer David Grann set out to find him . Grann retraces Fawcett's steps (minus the maggots and poison arrows) in hopes of discovering what felled the man who hobnobbed with Lawrence of Arabia, got funding from John D. Rockefeller, and was even (fictionally) rescued by Indiana Jones. : Laser-etching your MacBook Pro? Permanent and pricey. Instead, spend just $30 on an all-over vinyl decal from Infectious , a San Francisco-based design house that offers scores of original looks. The stickiness lasts for three years, but whenever you're ready for a change, the decals peel right off, residue-free. Bonus: The vinyl is coated in high-gloss laminate that protects your precious baby from wear and tear. : The National Association of Broadcasters has produced more than a dozen straight-shooting spots about the impending conversion to digital TV — all stuffy, all hinting at anarchy if you don't switch NOW! That's why it's nice to see this spoof : 99-year-old Mae Laborde fumbling with coaxial cables and URLs ("How many W's?"), as Announcer Man guides her through the "simple" process. Available on Hulu, it's a brilliant parody of government incompetence, consumer electronics, and, well, geezers. : Put your Rubik's Cube skills to good use: This app offers up 3-D puzzles that are actually proteins scientists are trying to understand. Log on and twist, pull, and fold digital models of molecules to mold proteins like insulin into their proper shapes. Mastering a protein's structure is essential for drug targeting, so every puzzle you solve could help solve a medical mystery. : Samuel L. Jackson again lends his voice to the title character of this manga turned television series turned TV movie, airing on Spike TV. In Resurrection , our hero finds that his previously vanquished foes have returned via the miracle of mad science, and the undead cyborg samurai are out for revenge. The stellar score from Wu-Tang's RZA may as well be a sequel to his Ghost Dog and Kill Bill soundtracks. (1 d ago)

• The Dark Lord of Broadband Tries to Fix ... The Dark Lord of Broadband Tries to Fix Comcast's Image
01/25/2009
Robb Topolski couldn't stay awake. All he could manage was three hours at a stretch before passing out. At first, his doctors were baffled, though they would eventually diagnose his condition as a severe form of anemia. But for the time being, no one knew anything except that it was dangerous for Topolski to venture too far from his bed. Topolski was a quality assurance engineer at Intel before going on disability, and he loved playing with new gadgets and software. So in late February 2007, he dragged himself out of the queen-size bed in his Hillsboro, Oregon, home, sat down at one of the three PCs a few feet away, and opened his latest toy, the file-sharing program Shareaza . He was a big barbershop-harmony fan—he'd sung baritone in Intel's One Bit Parody quartet—and he wanted to test the software by searching for some new tracks and sharing the ones on his hard drive: tunes like the Civil War-era hit "The Vacant Chair," and a Tin Pan Alley ode to prostitution, "She Is More to Be Pitied Than Censured." Topolski pointed Shareaza to his music folder. Then he fell asleep. And that's when something strange happened—or rather, that's when nothing happened. Each time he woke up and checked his PC, he discovered there had been no activity at all. Topolski knew that his music tastes weren't exactly mainstream; but still, among the millions of BitTorrent, Gnutella, and eDonkey users out there who could see his files, no one wanted even one of his tunes? He'd search some forums for help, then fall asleep again. After more failed file-sharing attempts, Topolski installed a packet-sniffing application so he could log and review everything coming over his network. He set up an online tunnel with a system administrator he knew in Brazil. Topolski's computer would appear to be surfing from South America, not the suburbs of Portland. That would tell him whether the problem was local. It took him six weeks of short-burst sleuthing to reach his conclusion. In a detailed post on DSL Reports—a site for broadband enthusiasts—under his online name, funchords, Topolski laid out a case against his Internet service provider. Comcast appeared to be blocking file-sharing applications by creating fake data packets that interfered with trading sessions. The packets were cleverly disguised to look as if they were coming from the user, not the ISP. It was as if, in the middle of a phone call to a friend, Comcast got on the line and in the caller's own voice told the friend he was hanging up, while the caller simultaneously heard the same message in the friend's voice. The post generated some discussion but no response from Comcast. It did, however, catch the attention of an Associated Press reporter, who called Topolski to ask about duplicating the tests. Topolski was happy to help and tried to provide all the assistance he could, but he lost touch with the reporter after doctors told him that, in addition to anemia, he had a massive malignant tumor in his colon. Months later, as he recuperated in the hospital after the tumor was removed, Topolski heard again from the AP reporter. The wire service had conducted its own tests on Comcast's network and the results had been equally damning. The resulting story about Comcast's misdeeds had gone viral. "Oh yeah, I think I kind of heard about that," Topolski said, the sedatives still surging through him. "It was a pretty big deal," the reporter reminded him. "Pretty surprising," Topolski mumbled. "I don't think you understand," the reporter insisted. "This is a really big deal." For Brian Roberts , 2008 was supposed to be the year Silicon Valley crowned him the most important person in its world. In five years as CEO of Comcast, the 49-year-old had turned his father's middling cable TV company into a media behemoth with $31 billion in annual revenue. Robb Topolski caught Comcast blocking Internet traffic, which prompted an FCC investigation. Photo: Robbie McClaran Comcast's cable infrastructure made the Internet possible. Sure, the tech metaphor of the moment was the cloud, but—metaphor be damned—Roberts knew that nothing could happen without the pipes. You needed big, fat cables to get all those petabytes of data there and back. And increasingly, those pipes belonged to Comcast. He didn't seek this kind of power. He spent the early part of the decade scooping up cable operations, but that was just to increase Comcast's customer base. Roberts provided packages that bundled TV, phone, and Internet, offering faster and faster speeds and luring away more and more customers from the phone companies, who couldn't keep up. (Comcast is now the third-largest telephone company in the US as a result.) As callers ditched their landlines, they tended also to abandon DSL, which the phone companies made difficult to buy as a stand-alone product. "DSL," Roberts told investors recently, "is the new dialup." Today, the company has 14.7 million broadband Internet customers, making Roberts the largest provider of high-speed access to the home, and sometime early this year he is set to wrest the title of largest broadband provider, period—to homes or businesses—from AT&T. Sure, new technologies are constantly being touted as potential rivals: 4G wireless, municipal Wi-Fi, fiber. But none of them really have a chance. By the end of 2007, 22 cents of every dollar spent on broadband in the US went directly to Comcast. And that figure looks like it's only going to increase; the number of ways to connect to the Internet reliably and at high speed is shrinking, not growing. "There's this magical thinking, both in the tech community and the regulatory community, that competition will solve all problems," says Craig Moffett , an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. "Well, get over it. The evidence says we're not going from two pipes to three but from two pipes to one." If Comcast is the one pipe that dominates, that's because its main rivals are coming up short. Verizon has spent the past few years trying to steal Roberts' Internet and TV subscribers with a $20 billion fiber-optic project called FiOS , while AT&T has its own $8 billion fiber product called U-verse . But together they cover only about 20 percent of the country, and analysts project that because of costs, they will stall at 40 percent. And reach is only one of their handicaps. In 2008, Roberts launched upgrades that made AT&T's 18-Mbps U-verse seem like a throwback to acoustically coupled modems. Verizon's problem is economics. It costs the company $4,000 to hook up each customer to FiOS, which now offers speeds as fast as 50 Mbps; Roberts spends less than $50 to give one of his customers the equivalent upgrade. As for wireless—supposedly the biggest threat to fat cable wires buried underground—no one really believes it can offer the bandwidth that consumers want at a reasonable price. Still, Roberts doesn't want to be thought of as merely the lord of the world's dumb pipes. He wants to be known as an innovator, a reputation he planned to burnish in 2008. Early last year, Roberts was ready to debut a reborn Comcast, a company that would turn those pipes into magical delivery systems. At the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in early January, he delivered the first keynote ever given by a cable CEO. "We must be the technology leader," he said from the stage, reeling off a list of new initiatives, like a Hulu-style video-streaming feature called Fancast (which debuted about the same time as Hulu) and a new open software platform called tru2way, designed to allow small, third-party iPhone-like apps to be added to any Comcast-connected TV. He promised incredible customer support and the rollout of Docsis 3.0—a new Internet service with speeds that will eventually exceed 100 Mbps. "I believe Comcast is the company you will want to partner with to give consumers what they really want." He ended with a declaration that Comcast was a different company now. "It's a whole new year for Comcast," Roberts said, his eyes darting around the room. "A whole new attitude. It's Comcast 3.0." Roberts truly believed Comcast was ready for tech stardom as the Facebook or Google of 2008. Instead, he got Topolskied. On October 19, 2007, the AP story broke with the headline "Comcast Actively Hinders Subscribers' File-Sharing Traffic, AP Testing Shows." Bloggers called for protests and boycotts; the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Comcast was using tricks formerly used by " malicious hackers ." A coalition of Internet law scholars and consumer groups petitioned the FCC to step in. Instead of basking in glory, Roberts found himself at the center of the fight over network neutrality—the attempt to keep ISPs from discriminating between different kinds of traffic and, say, favoring their own video or VoIP services over another company's. It's Good to Be the King: Comcast's Path to Power New residential broadband subscribers are opting for cable instead of DSL ... ... which has given cable a big share of the broadband market ... ... cementing Comcast's position as the undisputed ruler of cable and broadband. Sources: Bernstein Research, Comcast, Leichtman Research Group, Organisation For Economic Co-Operation And Development, Time Warner By blocking BitTorrent—in effect discriminating against those packets—Roberts had opened himself up to accusations that he was a censor and a monopolist who wanted to limit citizens' access to the Internet. He was painted as power-mad, unable to restrain himself. "Comcast will say, 'We're not blocking.' But they're degrading, prioritizing, and filtering, without telling users. And they're planning to do much more of this," blogged Susan Crawford , an Internet law professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Roberts hadn't anticipated the backlash. Subscribers accepted that cable TV was just entertainment, but the Internet felt more essential, like water or electricity, and consumers were starting to think of broadband as a constitutional right. Back in the days of basic cable, consumer complaints were always local and easily contained. But the Internet, as it turned out, was different. This was becoming a nationwide battle over who the pipes belonged to. Comcast had invested billions to build its network. Now its heaviest users were demanding that Roberts effectively hand over control to them . The new Comcast center is the tallest building in Pennsylvania, a 58-story reflective-glass beauty. When it opened last summer, its towering height sent a clear signal that Comcast had arrived. On the 45th floor, Brian Roberts can squint out over all of western Philadelphia, though today it gives him no pleasure. He's still plagued by thoughts of Robb Topolski. "I honestly don't think we're bad people, and we have no evil intentions," he says. "We helped invent broadband." Roberts is 6'2". He is so lanky, his gray suit jacket drapes off his shoulders as if it's still on the hanger, never touching his body. The entire company dresses the same way: formal and dated, like midwestern bankers. His speech is reassuringly calm, a nasal monotone he keeps in check regardless of his mood. Roberts could be a partner at a mid-tier law firm or a senior actuary who shoots hoops on the weekend. Inside the boardroom, his no-style style has made him a favorite of fellow media chiefs. No jockeying for headlines, no flash, no grand competitive vision to match a grander ego. "Comcast has become our top partner, or close to it," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt , who says he trusts Roberts' intuition and dealmaking skill. When Roberts approached Schmidt about investing in Clearwire , the WiMax company started by Craig McCaw, Schmidt quickly agreed. When Roberts then threatened to pull out during the final stages of negotiations, Schmidt dutifully followed suit. A few days later, Roberts called to say Comcast was back in. Google went back in, too, investing $500 million in 2008. "He works very hard," Schmidt says. "I think many people don't understand how he operates." Rob Glaser , CEO of RealNetworks, contrasts Comcast's style with Microsoft's approach. "If I do business with Comcast and then with a Comcast competitor, I don't wake up with a horse's head in my bed," Glaser says. "Even though Brian is in a position of a lot of power, there has never been a time when he approached that in a venal or reckless way." Yet there's a stunning disconnect between how fellow chief executives view him and what customers think. They see Comcast as arrogant, unresponsive, and overpriced. The company has managed to place last or close to last in just about every survey of customer service. In its annual ISP report, J. D. Power and Associates regularly rates Comcast in the cellar. Harris Interactive, in its annual brand reputation survey, ranked Comcast just ahead of ExxonMobil and Halliburton. Readers of the Consumerist, a shoppers'-rights blog, voted Comcast the second-worst company in the US—after only Countrywide Financial, of subprime mortgage infamy. Roberts remains philosophical about Comcast's poor rankings. Because Comcast is the biggest cable company, he argues, naturally it gets a high number of complaints. The Topolski affair, as far as Roberts is concerned, is all based on a misunderstanding. Every company "manages" its network by restricting and opening access to maintain speeds. Providers have little choice, especially when it comes to P2P, the kudzu of cable. File-sharing eats up a half to two-thirds of his upstream capacity in some places. And because cable is a shared network—with some 300 homes downloading from any one pipe—a few BitTorrent devotees could make everyone's surfing experience feel more like swimming against a riptide. "We manage our network so 99 percent of the people have a great high-speed experience," he says. "You've always had Ma Bell managing its network for things like how you handle voice traffic on Mother's Day. You get a busy signal occasionally." In his heart of hearts, Brian Roberts is still just a cable guy, exactly like his father before him. And there's something about the business that makes executives a little blasè9 about consumer complaints. They've been lambasted for so long, they just don't hear it anymore. Brian's father, perpetually bow-tied 88-year-old Ralph, started Comcast in the early 1960s. Programming cost nothing—he simply took broadcast signals and piped them to homes. Government regulation (unlike for broadcast television) was nonexistent. And expansion was just a matter of finding more towns to wire. Customers complained about price and service—but they never cut the cord. "It's the greatest thing since stealing," one of Ralph's first employees told his friends. Roberts joined the family business in 1981, right out of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He carefully studied how top cable execs worked, then carved out a new role for himself. While others were brash and self-confident, Roberts sought to be quietly persuasive. In 1997, for example, he convinced Bill Gates to sink $1 billion into Comcast, arguing that it would help spread the Internet. It was an amazing deal for Comcast. In return for his investment, Gates got nothing, not even a promise that Roberts—then Comcast's president—would deploy Microsoft's set-top-box software. Nor, for all his cash, did Gates get voting power; Roberts controls his business through supervoting shares (today he owns less than 1 percent of the stock yet commands 33 percent of the votes). "You never hear stories about how someone got the best of Microsoft," says one awed consumer-electronics executive. "Brian Roberts did. And how did he do it? With a velvet glove. He's the Bill Clinton of cable. He charms everybody." Roberts made his biggest move in 2002. AT&T was the dominant player in cable at the time, but after the dotcom bust Roberts sensed weakness and launched a successful $51 billion hostile bid for AT&T's cable unit. Comcast had been a regional player; suddenly it doubled in size, serving 21 million subscribers. It's now the local cable monopoly in 40 of the country's 50 largest markets. "They were just this little Philly company. Now they're like someone who, in a year, shot up from 5'8" to 6'2"," says Gigi Sohn , president of digital rights lobby Public Knowledge. "They've had to try on a whole new wardrobe and haven't found the right fit yet. They haven't done a good job of handling tremendous growth." PR disasters mounted. One Comcast cable guy fell asleep on a customer's couch; the customer filmed it and put it on YouTube. In Virginia, a 75-year-old woman got so fed up with the company's rude service and unreliable house calls that she smashed up a local Comcast office with a hammer. In the past two years, Roberts has implemented what he calls the Comcast Marshall Plan, hiring 15,000 new frontline technicians and customer service reps. By the end of 2007, Roberts assumed that his consumer-complaint issues were behind him. They weren't. In the old days, cable users might have been mollified, but Internet users were an entirely different breed. The Ames courtroom at Harvard Law School is typically reserved for mock trials. Its 290 seats face a massive desk on a raised dais, where real Supreme Court justices occasionally sit to determine the fate of fake cases. The FCC decided to hold its hearing on Comcast's actions against file-sharing in Cambridge, and on this February day in 2008, the five commissioners took their seats in the courtroom. At a long witness table, one place was set for Comcast, the rest for its critics. Earlier in the day, students, professors, activists, and customers gathered on the front steps of Austin Hall. Some carried signs blasting the cable giant—"No One Owns the Internet," read one—other protestors made impromptu speeches about neutrality. Before the hearing even started, campus cops had to turn people away. An overflow crowd gathered in the basement, where a computer showed a webcast of the proceedings upstairs. "It felt like the days before the Vietnam War," says David Clark , an MIT scientist who is considered one of the fathers of the Internet. Roberts didn't come. Instead, he sent his consiglieri, executive vice president David Cohen . A longtime Pennsylvania political operative, Cohen is stocky and pugnacious, the complete opposite of his boss. Cohen gave an impassioned and unequivocal defense of the ISP's actions. "I'm going to say, on the record, in front of this commission: Comcast does not block any Web site, application, or Web protocol, including peer-to-peer services. Period. Doesn't happen," he said. "What we are doing is a limited form of network management," he added, "during limited periods of network congestion." The response was just as unyielding. One by one, assorted Internet guardians and programmers leaned into their microphones and pointed out the inconsistencies in Cohen's statements. They noted the harm that Comcast was doing, calling it discriminatory and dangerous to capitalism, to America, to the Internet. "If Comcast gains the FCC's permission to block BitTorrent, you can bet that BitTorrent will be the tip of the iceberg," said Timothy Wu , a Columbia Law School professor. Nevertheless, Cohen seemed to really thrill the audience. He wasn't the most exciting speaker, but several times he was greeted with surprisingly enthusiastic applause. Later, it came out that Comcast had hired shills : seat-fillers, who the company claimed were there to save places for Comcast employees. But for some reason those employees never showed up. Comcast needed some other way to defuse the situation, so it put together a partnership with BitTorrent —"in the spirit of openness and fostering innovative solutions," as BitTorrent's president at the time put it—to find ways for the technology to travel in peace with the other packets on Comcast's network. It sounded like reconciliation, but it was only PR. While BitTorrent the company was cofounded by the same programmer who created BitTorrent the technology, it had no actual control over the standard or its users. BitTorrent fans dismissed Comcast's move as just another cynical attempt to fool the government. At the urging of Comcast's foes, the FCC called a second public hearing , this one at Stanford University, where the man who started it all, Robb Topolski, presented his side of the story. Nobody clapped for Comcast this time, because no one from the company came . The public beatings were beginning to hurt. In early fall, the company decided to measure just how bad the damage was by holding a series of subscriber focus groups. Most of the people, it turned out, had never even heard of P2P. In one session, a young man mentioned that he was using BitTorrent to assemble a library of every anime movie ever created. The rest of the group quickly turned on him, accusing him of stealing their broadband. "They didn't bash us; they didn't talk about poor customer service. It was actually pretty uplifting," says one employee who attended. "If you read the blogs on the P2P stuff, you'd think we were Satan." It drove Roberts crazy to see Comcast getting trashed, to have his family's business maligned. Roberts had told the crowd at CES that he wanted to lead the technology industry, to be a senior statesperson. Now self-proclaimed defenders of the Internet were casting him as a heel. "Comcast leadership has an attitude of 'Damn the torpedoes, we're not doing anything wrong,'" Public Knowledge's Sohn says. "Well, the apple rots from the top, from Brian Roberts." In August, the FCC issued a 67-page report that read as if Comcast was the worst company the FCC had ever regulated. Comcast lied about its actions, schemed to prevent oversight, confused customers, and put the future of Net-based innovation at risk. The commissioners doubted Comcast's contention that blocking BitTorrent helped its network. If that were the case, the report asked, why was the company doing it during times of light traffic and in areas where there were few bandwidth-sucking households? Wasn't it possible that Comcast was trying to stop a technology that was a threat to its own video-on-demand cable services? The final verdict was devastating: "In laymen's terms, Comcast opens its customers' mail because it wants to deliver mail not based on the address or type of stamp on the envelope but on the type of letter contained therein," the FCC wrote. "This practice is not 'minimally intrusive' but invasive and outright discriminatory." The FCC didn't levy a fine. In fact, it's still not even clear whether the commission has the regulatory right to punish such behavior. But Comcast couldn't ignore the public spanking (though it's currently appealing the decision). It submitted a report to the FCC detailing exactly how its network operated, from how many homes share an upstream connection (about 100) to the equipment it used to fight P2P traffic (the Sandvine PTS 8210). Comcast swore off discrimination based on any particular technology. And it disclosed a policy that had secretly been on the books for a while but which it now intended to enforce: It would cap subscriber bandwidth at 250 GB per month, enough for a user to download 125 movies in standard definition or to watch 1,750 hours of YouTube. "Was it handled perfectly? You know, it's like anything. I wish we could've done some things differently," Roberts says. "We hit a very raw nerve." In the end, the geeks won. But they may have unwittingly hurt their own cause. Roberts' "concession"—putting uniform, nondiscriminatory caps on usage—will likely mark the demise of the all-you-can-eat Internet buffet. ISPs like Time Warner Cable and AT&T have begun running limited tests of capped service, penalizing consumers for going over arbitrary limits (ranging from 5 to 150 GB). Countries where low caps are already common have found themselves trailing the world in how they use broadband; in Australia, where the average cap is 15 GB, 70 percent of Internet users say they never download or watch video online. When broadband is turned into a scarce commodity, surfing suddenly becomes a domestic negotiation: Is it worth it to watch one more Family Guy episode on Hulu, to run BitTorrent, or to download a movie from Netflix? A recent IDC study found that the vast majority of Internet users have no idea how much data they consume or even how to measure it. It's possible that Comcast's FCC-approved cure, if adopted by all ISPs, will strangle online video and drive consumers back to channel-surfing on cable TV, which would suit Comcast just fine. To be fair, Comcast's 250-GB cap is far above current global standards, and Roberts still may turn out to be an ideal steward of Internet access, but not everyone is willing to wait around to see if he remains so generous. In November, President-elect Barack Obama picked Susan Crawford as an adviser on recasting the FCC. As a Comcast-blasting law professor, Crawford had equated Comcast's actions against peer-to-peer file-sharing with those carried out by the Net censors in China. She called the company's moves "obviously deceitful" and argued for the Feds to break it up. If Roberts thought 2008 was bad, 2009 may be shaping up to be truly horrible. Brian Roberts is learning. And part of his education has come from an employee nicknamed Famous Frank. Last spring, a middle management customer-support executive named Frank Eliason, 36, started Twittering in his free time. Eliason is relentlessly upbeat and hated searching for "Comcast" on Twitter and seeing only slams. He asked for permission not just to defend the company but to actually try to fix the problems. If someone on Twitter complained about, say, an Internet outage, he'd start troubleshooting for them. Eliason—who goes by the online handle comcastcares —had already been gaining attention, and accolades, when one of Comcast's senior executives realized that maybe Roberts should be clued in. She left Roberts a voicemail—voicemail, not email, is the preferred form of communication among Comcast executives. "You're doing what?" he responded in his own voice message. "We're just letting him go at it?" Nevertheless, he did nothing to stop it. Eliason was actively trying to prevent customer complaints from spiraling into angry vendettas. These weren't just regular users, either, but Twitter users, many of whom were likely the same early adopters who love BitTorrent, who complain to the FCC, who might even enjoy building an anti-Comcast blog. Roberts began following the Twitter feed, and he realized that this was ... good. He OK'd adding people to Eliason's special forces team, overruling Eliason's direct boss. Soon, Eliason became a minor Internet celebrity, hence his new nickname inside the company. He was asked to speak at conferences as well as to other companies struggling with similar problems. Thanks to Famous Frank, Comcast began thinking about going even further. The weekend that the company published its response to the FCC—outlining how it managed its network and how it planned to change—one of Roberts' lieutenants suggested something even more radical: having ordinary company engineers go on message boards to answer questions. It was the kind of proposal that violated every tenet of the old cable code of business, and the matter could be settled only at an executive board meeting on the 52nd floor. Roberts, sitting with his back to the window, listened to both sides. Then he declared it was time to be a bit more transparent. He finally got it. He was turning a page. "I think we should do this, but we all have to have thick skins," he said. "People are going to vent. But that's all right." Senior writer Daniel Roth ( daniel_roth@wired.com ) profiled renegade Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget in issue 16.12. (1 d ago)

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Continued sectarian violence is just one of the many problems in Diyala Province that make holding fair elections almost impossible. (3 h ago)

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01/27/2009
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli soldier was killed by a bomb on the border with the Gaza Strip on Tuesday and Israeli forces killed a Palestinian, straining a 10-day-old ceasefire, although neither side suggested the truce was now over. (3 h ago)

• Global trust in business plummeted in 20... Global trust in business plummeted in 2008: survey
01/27/2009
BOSTON (Reuters) - Trust in business plummeted worldwide last year, as the global economic crisis sent financial institutions pleading for government support, leaving average people to question industry's ability to bring prosperity, according to a survey released on Tuesday. (3 h ago)

• Obama says time ripe to resume Mideast p... Obama says time ripe to resume Mideast peacemaking
01/27/2009
DUBAI (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama said the time was ripe for Israel and the Palestinians to resume peace negotiations and that America was prepared to extend a hand of peace to Iran if it "unclenched its fist." (3 h ago)

• Bankers braced for bitter pill of regula... Bankers braced for bitter pill of regulation
01/27/2009
DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Two years ago anyone uttering the words "state" and "regulation" in the same sentence would have been sneered at in high-powered banking circles gathered by the ski slopes of Davos. (3 h ago)

• Dudley to succeed Geithner at New York F... Dudley to succeed Geithner at New York Fed
01/27/2009
NEW YORK (Reuters) - William Dudley, the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank's markets group, has been chosen to succeed Timothy Geithner as president of the regional Fed bank, a source familiar with the decision said on Monday. (3 h ago)

• Obama to push for stimulus package on Ca... Obama to push for stimulus package on Capitol Hill
01/27/2009
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Capitol Hill on Tuesday to try to build momentum for an $825 billion package he says is urgently needed to keep the U.S. economy from sinking into an even deeper recession. (4 h ago)

• German business morale surprises, Japan ... German business morale surprises, Japan helps firms
01/27/2009
TOKYO/BERLIN (Reuters) - German business sentiment posted a surprise rise in January, a survey from Europe's biggest economy showed on Tuesday, offering a glimmer of optimism in a global crisis which prompted Japan to extend aid to small companies. (4 h ago)

• NY financier arrested in purported $400 ... NY financier arrested in purported $400 million scam
01/26/2009
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Authorities on Monday arrested the chief executive of a private New York financing firm on suspicion of running a purported Ponzi scheme that attracted $400 million in investments, U.S. law enforcement officials said. (8 h ago)

• American Express Q4 profit tumbles; tops... American Express Q4 profit tumbles; tops estimates
01/26/2009
NEW YORK (Reuters) - American Express Co said on Monday its fourth-quarter earnings tumbled 72 percent due to higher loan losses, lower customer spending and a strengthening U.S. dollar, but results beat expectations as it slashed costs. (12 h ago)

• Octuplets stun doctors at California hos... Octuplets stun doctors at California hospital
01/26/2009
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California woman shocked doctors by giving birth on Monday to octuplets, believed to be only the second set of eight babies born in the United States. (12 h ago)

• Jury selection begins in Florida terror ... Jury selection begins in Florida terror retrial
01/27/2009
A third trial is starting in Miami for six men accused of plotting with al-Qaida to destroy Chicago's Sears Tower and bomb FBI offices nationwide. (3 h ago)

• Eight babies born to parents who expecte... Eight babies born to parents who expected just seven
01/27/2009
Doctors methodically delivered seven babies, five boys and two girls dubbed with the letters A-through-G, just as they had repeatedly rehearsed. Then came the eighth. (4 h ago)

• Illinois governor's own words to haunt h... Illinois governor's own words to haunt him at trial
01/27/2009
The governor of Illinois has gone as public as just about anyone can, but today it'll be his private words taking center stage at his impeachment trial. (4 h ago)

• Obama seeks GOP input on economy Obama seeks GOP input on economy
01/27/2009
President Barack Obama is making good on his promise to hear from Republicans as he pushes for swift passage and bipartisan backing of his massive $825 billion plan intended to... (4 h ago)

• Geithner to issue new lobbying rules Geithner to issue new lobbying rules
01/27/2009
The newly confirmed treasury secretary is following the president's orders to get moving on the financial crisis quickly. (4 h ago)

• Gates faces Congress eager for details o... Gates faces Congress eager for details of Obama policy
01/27/2009
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is set to face a Congress eager to hear how the new administration plans to salvage the war in Afghanistan and hold a relative peace in... (4 h ago)

• Senators look into Madoff case Senators look into Madoff case
01/27/2009
Federal regulators can expect a grilling from the Senate Banking Committee today as it looks into disgraced investor Bernard Madoff's alleged multibillion-dollar pyramid scheme. (5 h ago)

• Two deaths blamed on winter storm, state... Two deaths blamed on winter storm, states in path prepare
01/26/2009
Preparations are well under way in Arkansas, Kentucky and parts of the Midwest because of an advancing storm. (12 h ago)

• House Dems may drop contraceptive spendi... House Dems may drop contraceptive spending
01/26/2009
Democratic officials say House leaders are seriously considering deleting family planning funds for the low-income from an economic stimulus bill headed for a vote later in the week. (13 h ago)

• Woman gives birth to octuplets in Califo... Woman gives birth to octuplets in California
01/26/2009
A woman has given birth to eight babies in a hospital south of Los Angeles, the world's second live-born set of octuplets. (14 h ago)

Business

Technology

Sports

Entertainment

• Breaking news: Despite global warming, s... Breaking news: Despite global warming, snow still exists
01/26/2009
Matt Drudge is very excited about the weather forecast for Washington, D.C. It seems that a winter snow watch has been issued for Wednesday, which just happens to be the day former Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee about global warming. This kind of thing makes people who don't believe the science behind the warming theory pretty happy; they've even coined a term for it, the " Gore Effect. " Drudge quotes one unnamed "Republican lawmaker" as saying, "I can't imagine the Democrats would want to showcase Mr. Gore and his new findings on global warming as a winter storm rages outside." And to think some people are worried about the state of science education in this country. For the record, as people like Drudge should know, local weather and global climate are not the same things. And besides, no one's predicting the end of snow as we know it anytime soon. Plus, focusing on a single anecdotal data point in this way is a really, really bad way to do science , or to make any sort of generalized observation at all. If you're playing Russian Roulette and on your first turn you happen not to die, this does not mean putting a loaded gun to your head and squeezing the trigger is a good idea. If you're visiting Seattle for a week and on your first day there it happens to be sunny, you should not throw out your raincoat and umbrella. If you're the Steinbrenner family and for the first time in ten seasons Joe Torre fails to lead the Yankees to the AL East title, you should not drive Torre away. (Admittedly, the Steinbrenners will almost certainly never grasp this concept.) (13 h ago)

• Gimme a D for Texas Gimme a D for Texas
01/26/2009
As Time magazine notes, when George W. Bush went back to Texas last week, he found a divided state Republican Party . Well-coifed incumbent governor Rick Perry faces an intraparty challenge from Kay Bailey Hutchison, who plans to leave the U.S. Senate before the end of her current term to battle Perry for the 2010 GOP gubernatorial nomination. What Time does not explain, however, is that Bush has returned to a state far different from the one he left eight years ago. A rapid rise in the Latino electorate promises to turn the state purple in the foreseeable future, and the Republicans have lost seats in the state legislature in each of the last three election cycles. But more importantly, having placed all its chips on the wrong party, in 2009 the state has ceded nearly all of its national influence. For the past 80 years, no state has held more power in the federal government than Texas. Starting in the 1920s, there have been only 10 years when the Lone Star state could not claim the allegiance of either the president, the vice president, the Speaker of the House or the leadership of at least one of the two major parties in at least one of the chambers of Congress. There have been relatively fallow periods, like the years following the departure of the last two Texan presidents, LBJ and the elder Bush, from the White House. It has been nearly a century, however, since Texas has experienced the power vacuum it is feeling now that the latest Texan president has headed home. And that is almost exclusively due to the fact that Texas has become so Republican. The state had a good run, especially in that distant era when it was monolithically Democratic. In 1929, John Nance Garner became Democratic minority leader, and then two years later, after the Republicans were hammered in the first national election during the Depression, Garner became Speaker of the House. For the next 40 years, except for two years when the most powerful Texan, Sam Rayburn, was merely minority leader of the House, Texas Democrats were either Speaker, Veep, or President; often party leaders in Congress were Texans as well. For example, Sam Rayburn was Speaker from 1940 to 1961, with two brief interruptions, while LBJ was leader of the Senate Democrats from 1953 to 1961, and whip for two years before that. When Richard Nixon replaced LBJ as president in 1969, Texas endured a diminished status for a time. But still, George Mahon was chairman of the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, and soon Olin Teague was chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and John Connally was secretary of the treasury. By 1973, George Bush was chairman of the RNC and Bob Strauss was head of the DNC, but the state really regained its accustomed power when Democrat Jim Wright became majority leader of the House in 1977. In 1981, George Bush became veep; six years later, Wright became Speaker, and in 1989 George Bush became president (defeating a Democratic ticket that included a Texan vice presidential candidate). Order was restored to the world, at least as viewed from Austin. When the elder Bush lost his reelection bid -- in a general election in which Texans came in second and third, and the winner was from next-door Arkansas -- the Lone Star state again suffered a brief period of relative powerlessness. Between 1993 and 1995, Texas had to make due with Clinton adviser Paul Begala and cabinet secretaries Lloyd Bentsen and Henry Cisneros. But Texas quickly recovered, this time by going all in with the GOP. Once a bulwark of the Democratic party, Texas began to turn deep red in the mid-'90s. In 1995, Dick Armey became House majority leader, and Tom Delay became majority whip. In 2001, George W. Bush became president. Delay, long seen as the true power behind Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, took over Armey's majority leader job in 2003. When Republicans took control of the Texas state legislature, Delay helped redraw congressional lines so that the state would send even more Republicans to Congress. A delegation of 22 House members in 1959, all but one of them Democrats, had grown to 32 in 2005, 21 of them Republican. Texas again had reached a peak of power. Since 2006, however, it's been a deepening valley. First Tom Delay lost his job. Then the Republicans lost control of Congress. Now George W. Bush is back in Texas. The most powerful Texas Republicans in Washington today are Senators Hutchison and Jon Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions. Hutchison was, until recently, the Senate GOP's policy chair, while Cornyn and Sessions helm the respective efforts of Republicans in the Senate and the House to reverse their fortunes, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. And the other problem, at least for Texas Republicans, is that the state is changing. Texas became majority minority in 2005, when whites dipped under 50 percent of the population. The surge in the Latino electorate, 20 percent of the vote in 2008 and climbing fast, is the prime factor turning the state purple again, but younger white voters and Anglo transplants are also less Republican than older whites. Experts who spoke to Salon predicted that Texas would be a presidential swing state by 2016 . While a Republican just won back Tom Delay's old Congressional seat in a Democratic year, on the local level the Democratic party is already resurgent. Democrats are now within two seats of a majority in the state house; they just used their increased power to force out Speaker Tom Craddick, the arch-conservative who helped Tom Delay gerrymander the state. Democrats peeled off enough dissident GOP votes to replace Craddick with a GOP moderate. A growing population means Texas is set to add three more seats in Congress after the 2010 census, but now it's no longer clear that that's a guarantee of three more Texas Republicans in Washington. If Texas Republicans want to hang on to power in Austin, they should probably decide the civil war within their party in favor of Kay Bailey Hutchison, and the more moderate wing of their party generally. Nominating Hutchison for governor in 2010 would probably be smarter than reupping with Rick Perry, since Hutchison appeals to suburban swing voters and Perry's base is rural and socially conservative. But if Texans of all political tribes want to reclaim the power they once held in Washington, they might need to fast forward to 2016 (or rewind to 1928), and start electing Democrats to Congress again. (14 h ago)

• Senate confirms Treasury nominee Geithne... Senate confirms Treasury nominee Geithner
01/26/2009
It was closer than the administration might have liked, but the Senate has confirmed Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary, and he'll be sworn in Monday night, just over an hour after the vote occurred. Tax problems hindered what was supposed to be smooth sailing for Geithner; ultimately, though, his confirmation passed 60-34. The votes in opposition came mostly from Republicans, but Democrats Tom Harkin, Robert Byrd and Russ Feingold also voted against, as did independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who caucuses with the Democrats. (16 h ago)

• The unbearable smallness of the RNC chai... The unbearable smallness of the RNC chair battle
01/26/2009
The race to run the Republican National Committee has gotten so nasty lately that you’d almost think the outcome really matters. Though a survey conducted by the Hotline showed incumbent Mike Duncan with the most pledged supporters, the contest still looks wide open, and the six candidates seem to be getting a little desperate to make their mark. The most recent squall has to do with one of the contenders, South Carolina GOP head Katon Dawson. Dawson has a history that suggests he may not be particularly attuned to racial issues: He was, until recently, a member of an all-white country club, and in 2005, he made these comments about the role desegregation played in pushing him into public life: Government reached into my life and grabbed me and shook me at the age of fifteen. I remember how blatant it was that government just thought that they knew better, that government just thought they knew better what to do in my school. And I can't say it was so much racial. I can say that people had a lot of stuff thrust on them because politicians thought they knew better. Now an anonymous e-mail attacking Dawson has circulated among RNC members. The e-mail contains a parody of the front page of USA Today, which reports, “RNC Members Choose ‘White’s Only’ Chairman” (sic). The Republicans are obviously sensitive about their support among African American voters, which has lately gone from merely very low to almost imperceptible. As I wrote last week, the contest seems, at times, to be coming down to an argument over who has the most black friends (candidates Michael Steele and Ken Blackwell, who are themselves black, included). This is not a very pretty spectacle, and underlining all of it is a certain irony. The Republicans are pretty far gone from reality if they think they can really flip black voters solely based on their choice for what is, ultimately, a relatively obscure bureaucratic job. (How many Americans do you think can name incumbent chairman Mike Duncan? Or even his former Democratic counterpart, the much higher-profile Howard Dean?) African Americans' loyalty to the Democratic Party was forged during the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement, and those bonds will be hard to break; the sandbox squabbles between Katon Dawson and his anonymous e-mail assailant won't help. (17 h ago)

• Geraldo chases down Blagojevich -- liter... Geraldo chases down Blagojevich -- literally
01/26/2009
Fox News' Geraldo Rivera got his interview with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, though not quite in the way he'd originally intended. In fact, their sit-down was canceled, an offense Rivera blamed on Blagojevich's publicist, Glenn Selig, who also represents accused killer Drew Peterson. Rivera said the publicist "knows that Drew Peterson is my arch-enemy, he sabotaged my interview." But Rivera, showing the reportorial spirit and enterprise that brought him inside Al Capone's vault , didn't take this lying down. "Rather than allow us to be victimized here at Fox News," he explained, he tracked down Blagojevich in the parking lot of "The View" after the governor appeared on that show. Video of the resulting interview follows; I won't go into any further detail here, as it really has to be seen to be fully appreciated. (19 h ago)

• Obama moves on fuel, emissions standards Obama moves on fuel, emissions standards
01/26/2009
President Obama killed two birds with one stone Monday, breaking with Bush administration precedent once again by moving to tighten fuel efficiency standards for U.S. cars and allow states to set their own, stricter, rules governing automobile emissions. One of the memorandums Obama signed directs the EPA to reconsider the Bush administration's decision to bar California from setting its own emissions standards. It's not an order to reverse the decision, at least not explicitly, but the agency is expected to go that direction after a review. At least 13 other states would follow California if its application is approved. The second memorandum was directed at the Transportation Department. Obama instructed the department to come up with regulations aimed at implementing a 2007 law that requires a 40 percent increase in gas mileage for cars and light trucks by 2020, which would bring the minimum amount of miles per gallon allowed by law to 35. This memorandum deals with rules that would begin in the 2011 model year; under the law, the rules can't be made more than five years before implementation. The Bush administration proposed its own set of regulations, which were criticized as being too weak, but never implemented them. (20 h ago)

• Barnum and Blago Barnum and Blago
01/26/2009
Memo to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich: Comparing yourself to Mohandas Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela is one thing. But to say you feel like Jimmy Stewart's character in " Mr. Smith Goes to Washington "? Well, that's going a little too far. OK, admittedly, everything about Blagojevich's latest foray into the national media spotlight is over the top. While he's being interviewed on what seems to be every possible channel, his trial in the Illinois state Senate is starting -- and he's skipping it, complaining that "the fix is in" and saying, "I'm talking to Americans to let them know what's happening in the land of Lincoln. If they can do it to a governor, they can do it to you." Also, he's now claiming that his impeachment isn't about, say, his alleged effort to sell President Obama's Senate seat -- an effort that the feds caught on tape -- but about the Legislature's desire to raise the income tax. Oh, and he's driven away his lead attorney. Then, last but certainly not least: He said Monday that he considered appointing Oprah Winfrey to Obama's seat. Unfortunately for Blagojevich, while the media has been more than happy to give him airtime, there was only so long interviewers would let him ramble on without actually calling him out, and that time appears to have come. On "The View" Monday morning, Barbara Walters took the governor on , hitting him repeatedly with tough, uncomfortable questions. And once the real interview was done, the show's other hosts simply made Blagojevich look silly -- one, Joy Behar, even asked him to do an impression of Richard Nixon saying, "I am not a crook." (He declined.) At this point, the only thing that could make this whole spectacle even weirder is if Blagojevich did a live interview with Geraldo Rivera. Which is, presumably, why Blagojevich is reportedly doing a live interview with Geraldo Rivera on Fox News at 2 p.m. ET Monday. (22 h ago)

• S.F. liberals to host new Gitmo on Alcat... S.F. liberals to host new Gitmo on Alcatraz?
01/26/2009
As a general rule, it's hard to go wrong -- at least politically -- by playing to Americans' inherent NIMBY ism. So naturally, that's what Republicans are trying to do as they argue against the closure of the military prison in Guantánamo Bay. But their arguments have now become, frankly, transparently political, even outright silly. Take one comment House Minority Leader John Boehner made Sunday: "You know, if, if the liberals in America believe that Gitmo ought to go, then maybe we ought to just open Alcatraz and move those prisoners there." Boehner's not the only member of his party to suggest Alcatraz, the infamous prison in San Francisco Bay, as a replacement for Guantánamo; Sen. Kit Bond and Rep. Bill Young have also floated the idea. And again, as political theater, this isn't a bad move. Poking those wimpy, hypocritical San Francisco liberals certainly appeals to the base, and it's also an opportunity to take a shot at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose district is in the city. But this is one of those moments that reminds us why, exactly, everyone hates Congress . Even for political theater, this is just absurd; it's not an attempt to actually provide a solution, just a chance to taunt the Democrats to score a cheap point. Boehner, Bond and Young surely know how unworkable the idea is. Alcatraz is, as Pelosi herself observed, a national park -- it hasn't served as a working prison for more than 45 years. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy shut it down in 1963 because the buildings were eroding and the facility was much more expensive to operate than its counterparts. At the time, a necessary renovation to fix the crumbling structures would have cost $5 million. That's about $35 million in today's dollars, and that's a baseline that doesn't take into account the further damage that's occurred over the years, the cost of transforming a tourist attraction back into a secure prison, the cost of modernization or the expense of bringing on an entirely new staff. A Fox News article on the subject, naturally, pokes at Pelosi, suggesting she doesn't have a sense of humor. It also includes this sentence describing Boehner's response to the speaker's point about Alcatraz being a park: "That explanation didn't stop House Minority Leader John Boehner from repeating the suggestion on Sunday, making that point that closing down Guantanamo by year's end may not be the best plan considering the recidivism rate of terrorist detainees is about 12 percent." That's a whole other issue, one where those advocating for Guantánamo to remain open are using statistics that are misleading without context. Assuming that the Pentagon's figures about detainees released from Guantánamo returning to the battlefield are correct -- there's reason to believe they're wildly inflated , but let's just make the assumption for the moment -- the recidivism rate is, as Fox says, about 11 or 12 percent. As Peter Bergen pointed out to CNN, that's less than one-fifth of the recidivism rate for U.S. state prisoners, which is about 65 percent. (23 h ago)

• Quote of the day Quote of the day
01/26/2009
From the end of Bill Kristol's latest piece in the New York TImes: This is William Kristol’s last column. (1 d ago)

• After Cheney, vice presidentia... After Cheney, vice presidential house is clearer on Google Earth
01/27/2009
For years, aerial views of the residence have been blurred. Now, new images are bringing it into focus. Dick Cheney may not have lived in an undisclosed location while he was vice president, but it was all but impossible to see it on Google Earth. (8 h ago)

• Britain's House of Lords a-twi... Britain's House of Lords a-twitter over corruption scandal
01/27/2009
Four peers allegedly told undercover journalists they'd use their influence for a price. The turmoil revives scrutiny of the aristocratic institution's relevance. Their robes are red, their fur cuffs are white and now a corruption scandal has Britain's House of Lords feeling blue. (8 h ago)

• Chargers sign deal to market i... Chargers sign deal to market in L.A., Orange County
01/27/2009
With its stadium situation still an issue in San Diego, the team wants to expand its reach. Could this lead to a move north? The San Diego Chargers signed a deal today to market the team in Los Angeles and Orange County, a development that could be viewed as an initial step toward an ultimate relocation. (8 h ago)

• Commercial operations to close... Commercial operations to close at Palmdale Regional Airport
01/27/2009
In the wake of United's departure, Los Angeles World Airports officials say it no longer makes sense to operate the airport. The city still hopes to take over operations, mayor says. More than seven weeks after United Airlines canceled its flights out of Palmdale, Los Angeles World Airports announced Monday that it plans to surrender its federal certification to operate Palmdale Regional Airport as a commercial facility. (8 h ago)

• A mass transit dilemma: Riders... A mass transit dilemma: Ridership up, funds down
01/27/2009
Public transport systems are reeling from an economic crisis that has dried up tax revenue and blown gaps in state budgets. They are having to raise fares and cut services. Demetrius McClain's late-morning commuter train sped smoothly past strip malls and palm trees, heading north to his job in Ft. Lauderdale, about 30 miles away. (8 h ago)

• Obama sends George Mitchell on... Obama sends George Mitchell on Mideast peace mission
01/27/2009
The president emphasizes his break with the Bush administration and the need for respect in dealing with the Arab world. President Obama dispatched his special Middle East envoy on his inaugural peacemaking trip Monday, declaring that former Sen. George J. Mitchell would speak for the White House in a search for "progress, not just photo ops." (8 h ago)

• Deluge of layoffs hits U.S. ec... Deluge of layoffs hits U.S. economy
01/27/2009
Companies including Home Depot, Caterpillar, Pfizer and Sprint plan to cut nearly 60,000 jobs, adding urgency to the need to agree on a stimulus plan. U.S. companies slashed nearly 60,000 jobs Monday, adding impetus to the Obama administration's efforts to reach agreement on a plan to pump $825 billion into the economy over a two-year period. (8 h ago)

• Geithner confirmed as Treasury... Geithner confirmed as Treasury chief
01/27/2009
Many senators can't overlook his tax woes. Obama says work 'must begin at once.' Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Timothy F. Geithner won confirmation Monday as President Obama's Treasury secretary despite personal tax lapses that turned more than a third of the Senate against him. (8 h ago)

• Obama ramps up bipartisan effo... Obama ramps up bipartisan efforts
01/27/2009
So far, Republican lawmakers have been cool to the president's lobbying on the stimulus bill. He visits Capitol Hill on Tuesday. President Obama travels to the Capitol today to meet with House and Senate Republicans, the latest in a series of high-profile efforts to reach across the aisle and make good on his campaign promise to swim against the partisan tide that has flooded Washington for decades. (8 h ago)

• Commerce secretary may hail fr... Commerce secretary may hail from Silicon Valley
01/27/2009
Symantec CEO John Thompson is a top contender for the post. His confirmation would be a boon for the high-tech industry in the Obama administration. John W. Thompson, the outgoing chief executive of network security firm Symantec Corp., has emerged as a leading contender to be Commerce secretary, a move that would give the high-tech industry a major voice in the Obama administration. (8 h ago)

• Supreme Court rejects suit in ... Supreme Court rejects suit in Long Beach case
01/27/2009
The decision, in a case where a man was wrongfully convicted of murder, broadens protections for district attorneys and other chief prosecutors. The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a lawsuit by a Los Angeles man wrongfully convicted of murder and gave district attorneys a broad shield against being sued even if their management mistakes send an innocent person to prison. (8 h ago)

• Supreme Court rules for worker... Supreme Court rules for worker in retaliation lawsuit
01/27/2009
A schools employee was fired after answering questions in an internal sexual harassment investigation of supervisor. Justices said a lower court's ruling that only those filing complaints were protect Employees who cooperate with an internal investigation and report inappropriate behavior in the workplace are protected from retaliation under civil rights laws, the Supreme Court said Monday, strengthening the laws against sexual harassment on the job. (8 h ago)

• Blagojevich trial begins witho... Blagojevich trial begins without him
01/27/2009
The Illinois governor, instead, chooses to do TV interviews. 'I can't get a fair hearing in Illinois,' he says. As Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich's impeachment trial began in Springfield, Ill., on Monday, the governor stayed away -- far, far away. (8 h ago)

• Switch to digital TV expected ... Switch to digital TV expected to be rescheduled
01/27/2009
The Senate votes to defer the transition from February to June, which would give millions of households time to prepare. People who aren't ready for next month's nationwide switch to all-digital broadcast TV are likely to get a four-month extension after the Senate voted Monday to delay the conversion until June. (8 h ago)

• Massive Job Cuts Renew Calls for Quick A... Massive Job Cuts Renew Calls for Quick Action on Stimulus
01/26/2009
Several U.S. companies reeling from the economic slump announced a total of some 45,000 job cuts Monday. Analysts assess what the news signals about efforts to revive the economy. (16 h ago)

• Obama Orders Regulators to Revisit Fuel-... Obama Orders Regulators to Revisit Fuel-economy Standards
01/26/2009
President Barack Obama pledged renewed U.S. leadership to fight global warming Monday, as he ordered regulators to revisit the tightening of fuel-economy standards for new cars and trucks. Experts debate the significance of the announcement for automakers. (16 h ago)

• Major U.S. Companies Announce Sweeping N... Major U.S. Companies Announce Sweeping New Job Cuts
01/26/2009
More than 45,000 job cuts were announced by major U.S. companies Monday, part of a wave of global employment losses in response to dismal 2008 financial results. (17 h ago)

• Ask Your Questions on the Switch to Digi... Ask Your Questions on the Switch to Digital Television
01/26/2009
On Feb. 17, the nation's television broadcast system is set to make the switch to all-digital -- although some lawmakers are urging that the transition date be delayed until June. PBS chief Paula Kerger and other experts take your questions. (18 h ago)

• Congolese Warlord on Trial for Using Chi... Congolese Warlord on Trial for Using Child Soldiers
01/26/2009
Congolese former militia leader Thomas Lubanga pleaded not guilty to using child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo's 1998-2003 civil war, as the International Criminal Court's historic first trial opened Monday. (18 h ago)

• Following Iceland's Financial Meltdown, ... Following Iceland's Financial Meltdown, Coalition Government Collapses
01/26/2009
Iceland's government collapsed Monday under the pressure of the country's financial meltdown, the first government to fall as a direct result of the global economic crisis. The prime minister said he was unwilling to meet coalition partners' demand to take his post. (21 h ago)

• Pharmaceutical Giant Pfizer to Acquire W... Pharmaceutical Giant Pfizer to Acquire Wyeth in $68 Billion Deal
01/26/2009
Pfizer Inc. announced Monday it is acquiring rival drug maker Wyeth for about $68 billion, in the largest pharmaceutical sector takeover since 2000. The deal will help Pfizer diversify its offerings as its cash-cow Lipitor nears the end of its patent protection. (1 d ago)

• Financial blogger's arrest tests Korea's... Financial blogger's arrest tests Korea's progress on human rights
01/26/2009
The government has charged Park Dae-sung with spreading false rumors that cost the country billions. (18 h ago)

• Sri Lanka nears victory in long war with... Sri Lanka nears victory in long war with Tamil Tigers
01/26/2009
The Army has squeezed the rebels into a small patch of jungle since seizing their last major stronghold Sunday. But they could still mount a messy counterinsurgency. (18 h ago)

• In boost for workers, high court affirms... In boost for workers, high court affirms shield from employer retaliation
01/26/2009
The justices rule that civil rights law protects a woman who was fired after answering questions in a harassment probe. (18 h ago)

• Gas dispute with Russia boosts European ... Gas dispute with Russia boosts European interest in alternative pipeline
01/26/2009
The Nabucco pipeline, scheduled to start construction in 2010, would ship gas from the Caspian region and the Middle East. (18 h ago)

• Ex-Guantánamo inmates return to mil... Ex-Guantánamo inmates return to militancy in Yemen
01/26/2009
Militants in Yemen threatened Monday to strike the US Embassy for a second time. (18 h ago)

• DEMS BENDING ON $$ PLAN DEMS BENDING ON $$ PLAN
01/27/2009
House Democrats seem likely to drop family-planning funds for Medicaid recipients from the $825 billion economic stimulus bill after an appeal from President Obama, who is trying to woo Republican critics of the legislation. A final decision is... (3 h ago)

• OBAMA ON ARABIC TV OBAMA ON ARABIC TV
01/27/2009
WASHINGTON - President Obama has given his first formal TV interview to an Arabic cable network. He taped the interview with Al-Arabiya yesterday, as his envoy to the Middle East, former Sen. George Mitchell, set out on a trip to the area... (7 h ago)

• O'S BID FOR LESS GASSY NY O'S BID FOR LESS GASSY NY
01/27/2009
President Obama will make New York state greener by letting it impose strict auto-emission standards, Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Paterson said yesterday. Obama ordered his environmental officials to review a decision by the Bush administration that... (7 h ago)

• Anagram: Family Planning/Flying In Napal... Anagram: Family Planning/Flying In Napalm
01/26/2009
I have been reading up on a few things about the stimulus package, and some of the things you here are just plain wrong. EXAMPLE: A portion of the plan calls for more funding for medicaid family planning services. What do the Republicans call this? Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on [...] (13 h ago)

• Anagram: Whaddayamean Busy?/Ashamed Anyw... Anagram: Whaddayamean Busy?/Ashamed Anyway, Bud?
01/24/2009
I am a very Busy Rhino. Saturday night is apparently not alright, unless you enjoy making copies, which is what I’m doing…. or will be again in a few minutes, anyway. A few links, a few blurbs, a video and I am done. Chuck Schumer is the man behind the new senator from New York, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. [...] (2 d ago)

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