A March 9 commentary submitted to Huffington Post by former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura was removed after publication by the site, which replaced it with a note stating that contributors are banned from engaging in conspiracy theories:

Editor's Note: The Huffington Post's editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories -- including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.

"I can't believe the Huffington Post today will practice censorship. I've got news for them," Ventura responded to the action. "I won't ever write for em again."

I get tired of a lot of the conspiracy stuff posted by users on the Drudge Retort, which gets 2-4 posts a day from Infowars, Prison Planet and similar sites, but I've never banned it. I know it's difficult for Huffington Post to deal with fringe stuff -- the conservative group blog Red State kicked off birthers and truthers last month -- but the Post is doing a public disservice by allowing no discussion at all on a subject. Ventura is a former governor. When prominent people challenge the government, the idea that their views should be censored on the grounds they are a "conspiracy theory" is antithetical to open debate in a free society. Any far-out idea could be dismissed as conspiracist. Would the Post have censored Jim Garrison from writing about the Kennedy assassination? The site is running Jenny McCarthy's dangerous autism vaccine quackery, a view widely discredited by medical experts.

To combat the censorship, I republished Ventura's censored 9/11 commentary yesterday and gave it major news banana treatment on the Retort:

You didn't see anything about it in the mainstream media, but at a recent conference in San Francisco, more than 1,000 architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9-11.

That's right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy -- because they don't buy the government's version of events. They want to know how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11 seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible or whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought down the twin towers and WTC Building 7.

His views aren't faring too well in the Retort discussion. But they deserve to be heard.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:05:46 -0400

A story I missed last month: After University of Alabama-Huntsville professor Amy Bishop was arrested for shooting up her faculty department, Boston Herald reporter Laurel J. Sweet blew the lid off a shocking angle of the crime: Bishop was an avid player of role-playing games.

Accused campus killer Amy Bishop was a devotee of Dungeons & Dragons -- just like Michael "Mucko" McDermott, the lone gunman behind the devastating workplace killings at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield in 2000.

Bishop, now a University of Alabama professor, and her husband James Anderson met and fell in love in a Dungeons & Dragons club while biology students at Northeastern University in the early 1980s, and were heavily into the fantasy role-playing board game, a source told the Herald.

"They even acted this crap out," the source said.

I didn't think the press was still capable of anti-D&D hysteria like this. Back in the '80s, Joe McGinness wrote a ridiculous true-crime book on some murderer who blamed D&D for his crime, Tom Hanks starred in the anti-D&D TV movie Mazes and Monsters and grieving mother Patricia Pulling began the scare group Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, blaming the game caused her teen-age son's suicide.

But these days, D&D and role-playing games are about as controversial as Yahtzee. Millions of people played the game as kids and grew up without worshiping the occult or committing murders. The deaths of game creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in recent years were major news covered across the globe, sparking countless remembrances by people who huddled around a table with dice when we could've been experimenting with drugs and alcohol. (I was going to say drugs, sex and alcohol, but who am I kidding?) Today, millions of people play MMORPGS and other videogames that are D&D in everything but name.

Like out and proud D&D geek Stephen Colbert, I was a dungeon master in my youth (and not the cool kind who wears assless leather chaps and ties women up on torture wheels in my basement). I've managed to reach middle age without killing anybody at all, not even a single drifter or truck stop prostitute.

Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:47:07 -0400

On Jan. 18, the British band The Heavy impressed David Letterman so much with their song "How You Like Me Now?" that he did something he's never done before in the history of his program -- he asked for an encore.

The YouTube video is the televised broadcast -- which edits out most of the encore -- but you can see it in full in high quality on Letterman's web site. Paul Shaffer and Letterman even perform part of the encore.

There have been some great live performances on Letterman, including TV on the Radio's Wolf Like Me and Phoenix's 1901, but that one tops them all.

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:40:48 -0500

I was reading news stories this afternoon on MSNBC when one of its pages triggered a malware warning in Google Chrome:

The website at www.msnbc.msn.com contains elements from the site adrotator.mediaplex.feed-mnptr.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer.

According to Google's safe browsing alert for that feed-mnptr.com domain, it has contained three trojan programs and five browser security exploits. The domain has been used as an intermediary to infect users of Digg, CNBC and MSN.Com.

I can't check without visiting the MSNBC page, which would be extremely dumb, but based on the domain the malware appears to be coming in from a third-party ad service. There was a report Wednesday that the Drudge Report had hosted malware, probably from an ad network.

Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:04:20 -0500

The Associated Press reported today on a 51-year-old New Jersey man facing trial for raping five of his daughters, three of whom allegedly bore his children from the assaults. He faces 27 charges including sexual assault, child endangerment and criminal sexual contact, but the wire service has decided not to name him in its coverage:

The Associated Press generally doesn't identify victims of sexual crimes and is not reporting the names of the husband and wife to protect the identities of their children, now all over 18 years of age.

The longstanding media policy to shield some crime victims from being identified has always been a questionable one, since people who suffer rape aren't the only victims who might be harmed by the publicity generated by a trial. Here, though, the policy has been extended to the perpetrator of a crime.

I question whether in a free society it is acceptable to put someone on trial and potentially imprison them while never revealing the person's name to the public. What if someone has information pertaining to the accused that ought to be known to police? What if other victims are out there who might never know to come forward unless told of the arrest?

In any case, the web has made it considerably more difficult for information of this kind to stay secret. The New Jersey Star-Ledger and New York Daily News identify the accused rapist as Aswad Ayinde.

Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:54:51 -0500

For the past 48 hours, I've been dealing with a Sendmail server that was shutting down frequently with a load average above 13. The server's getting flooded constantly with spam attempts to non-existent users on more than 100 domains.

I've set up Sendmail to use a virtusertable that rejects every non-valid email address with a "user unknown" error. This is helpful, but Sendmail still has to take the time to reject each spam attempt. Since all but six domains on the server don't receive any mail at all, I wanted to find a way to stop Sendmail from receiving any requests for those domains.

After doing some research, I decided to try setting a fake MX record for the domains that do not send or receive mail. Here's how MX records are set for these domains:

IN MX 10 mail.example.com.

There's no mail server associated with that hostname.

On servers that do exchange email, fake MX records can be used to deter spammers. Most email servers are equipped to deal with mail servers that are unavailable. They queue the outgoing mail and try an alternate mail server, if one has been defined for the domain. Spam software can't take the time to queue an outgoing mail for delivery later because it is sending millions of messages. If it finds a mail server that's unavailable, it gives up and goes on to the next server.

Putting fake servers as the first and last MX record in a domain supposedly discourages spammers without affecting the receipt of legitimate email. Spammers hit the fakes and give up. Legitimate mail servers hit a fake, then try the next option and deliver the mail.

Here's how MX records can be set to achieve this:

IN MX 10 mail1.example.com.
IN MX 20 mail2.example.com.
IN MX 30 mail3.example.com.

The mail1.example.com and mail3.example.com servers are fakes that don't resolve properly. The functioning mail server is at mail2.example.com.

So far, the approach appears to work. Legitimate email is getting through and most domains aren't getting any spam attempts at all.

Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:17:53 -0500

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz began a new blog three weeks ago called What I Couldn't Say to "put context around some of the decisions I faced at Sun," now that he's free from the corporate obligations to watch his words.

Schwartz writes today about tech company patent wars, revealing a 2003 meeting where Apple's Steve Jobs threatened Sun over patents:

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were "stepping all over Apple's IP." (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, "I'll just sue you."

My response was simple. "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence -- do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.

As a longtime Java book author I can remember the Project Looking Glass pitch. I can't think of any reason why Jobs would threaten patent litigation to stop it. Sun proposed and abandoned countless big ideas over the years.

Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:49:57 -0500

Since joining Twitter on Feb. 24, Conan O'Brien has amassed more than 534,000 followers and posted 10 tweets. Contractually exiled from late night television until September, O'Brien has embraced the new medium, sharing inane personal details of his life, airing petty grievances and even posting a Twitpic of how many people it takes for him to compose each tweet.

Friday afternoon, O'Brien announced that he has taken his first follower:

I've decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.

Killen, a Fowlerville, Michigan, resident who has the username LovelyButton, has already acquired 10,200 followers and become one of Twitter's trending topics.

Furthering the insanity, her recent tweet calling Fowlerville resident Russell Bigos "an idiot" is making him a figure of scorn and sympathy. Killen's fiance John Slowik Jr. posted on Facebook Jan. 12 that he was "about to woop bigos in nba2k10," so this could be a videogame basketball rivalry gone terribly wrong. We'll have to wait for the media to dig for answers.

MTV did a video interview with Killen Friday night. She told MTV she was asked in advance by an O'Brien rep if it would be OK to pick her. Since her selection, she's received a free Apple iMac from HornBlasters and offered other freebies for her impending wedding.

Killen posted a link on Twitter to her Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure donation page, where she's raised $1,100 towards her $5,000 goal in nine hours.

By the way, I've also decided to follow someone at random. He likes nipple clamps and the metric system. Jonathan Bourne, your life is about to change.

Update: Sarah Killen is friends on Facebook with Aaron Bleyaert, the former Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien blogger, so it's possible that the selection wasn't entirely random. This scandal could go all the way up to the top! What did Coco know and when did he know it?

Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:26:59 -0500

Dave Winer claims on Scripting News today that Google is playing dirty with RSS in favor of Atom:

... Google is going to start reading feeds, but if I understand correctly, they're going to ignore the billions of RSS feeds out there, and ask everyone to convert to Atom to get more currency in search. You can imagine that I don't like this. I wouldn't like it even if I didn't play a big role in getting those billions of feeds out there. I wouldn't like because I have thousands of RSS feeds on my servers, and believe me -- they are not changing to Atom anytime in the next few decades. I don't think I'm alone in that.

Now a little preaching. Big companies always feel they can push the rest of us around, but I gotta say -- I've never seen it work. Usually the lesson they learn is that they would be better off if they would just Go With The Flow, and let the users guide them. Nothing wrong with reading Atom feeds, but to ignore RSS, well guys that's just plain dumb.

Give up the fight Google. You don't have to acknowlege me, but RSS -- that's a force of nature. That's why I did rssCloud -- for you -- to give you the impetus to do what you should have done naturally, support the formats that the users have chosen. It's not too late to get our relationship back on track. I'm not your enemy, I'm just one guy in an apartment in the West Village writing on my blog.

He understands incorrectly.

If he's talking about the news that Google may use PubSubHubbub (PuSH) to allow web publishers to submit new content to the search engine, there's no reason that this development would exclude "billions of RSS feeds." The PuSH protocol does not make feed publishers or software developers choose Atom instead of RSS. The protocol works equally well with feeds in both formats. If a hub is monitoring an RSS feed, it sends RSS data out to interested clients. If it monitors an Atom feed, it sends Atom.

There was some early confusion because the PuSH specification was not clear on this point. To address the issue, I made some spec suggestions in September and Brett Slatkin incorporated them into the current draft of the specification. The spec leaves no doubt that PuSH is designed for both formats.

This blog is proof of that. I upgraded my blog a few months ago to send out updates using the protocol. Although my feed is in RSS format, PuSH has no trouble transmitting updates. People who are reading my blog in Google Reader or Google Buzz -- two of the first popular clients to support PuSH -- will get this blog entry a few seconds after I publish it.

PuSH is the best way to deliver real-time updates to RSS or Atom feeds. Now that WordPress supports the format on all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.Com, all of the leading blog platforms have adopted the format.

The alternative, RSSCloud, still lacks a specification seven months after Winer revived it. There's only some rough implementation notes and no process in place to enable interested parties to decide what features the protocol will contain or how the spec will be written.

Google, if you're reading this, I'm concerned about our relationship. Why don't you call me any more? Things can be good again, baby. I'm sorry I got so angry before. I love you so much sometimes it just makes me crazy.

Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:17:10 -0500

I posted a review on Mister Television of NBC's new drama Parenthood:

The Parenthood pilot on NBC was the most exhausting television I've endured this season.

The show begins with Peter Krause jogging down a Berkeley, Calif., street. The jog has left him wheezing for air, in spite of the fact that Krause is physically fit and doesn't appear to have an ounce of fat on him. (I make this observation in an entirely heterosexual way.) He's sitting on his taut buttocks (OK, that was a little gay) when he gets a call from his sister Lauren Graham. She's moving to Berkeley with her teen-age daughter, who is acting out sexually with boys out of frustration with the fact that her mom is hotter. Graham needs to know that she's making the right decision by moving, and if she's making the wrong decision she wants to blame Krause. In between his dying breaths, Krause agrees to this deal.

I challenge anyone to write a more detailed review while missing the last 50 minutes of the episode.

I run the site with television's Jonathan Bourne. We're going to start up a TV death pool there in the fall that's 10 percent better than the competition.

Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:32:55 -0500

Yesterday, the CBS News web site ran a five-paragraph story on the fact that Susan Dey was absent from a Partridge Family reunion:

The Partridge Family cast was one member short when they reunited on television Tuesday morning.

The cast of the popular '70s sitcom appeared on the Today Show as part of their "Great TV Families Reunited" series, but actress Susan Dey, who played eldest daughter Laurie Partridge, was not in attendance.

Danny Bonaduce, who in the years after his child stardom faced drug addiction and legal troubles, was present for the reunion.

Watch the Reunion

The show, which centered around a widow and her five children who embark on a music career, aired from 1970-1974.

A similar absence occurred Monday morning, when the cast of Eight is Enough reunited on the morning program minus actor Adam Rich. The actor endured many personal issues after his time on the show, including arrests and substance abuse.

This story, which contains no quotes and looks to have been written in about five minutes, was published solely for one reason: Dey was a volcanic search term on Google Trends yesterday. People wanted to know why Dey was absent, so they looked on Google.

CBS is promoting a rival network with the story and even links to video on NBC's web site.

There are a lot of online news sites and blogs that use Google Trends as their assignment desk, churning out poorly researched stories quickly to capitalize on a hot news search term. Weak-ass Dey stories were filed by such august journalistic enterprises as Puggal, Associated Content and Thaindian News.

So the network of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow is in good company.

Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:32:17 -0500

When news breaks such as today's massive earthquake in Chile, one of the first places where images show up from the scene is on Twitpic, a popular image-posting service for Twitter users. You can find links to these images on Twitter search by including "twitpic" as one of your search terms, but that's not as useful as seeing thumbnails of the actual images. You have to click each link to see what it contains.

To make it easier to see the images being posted about Chile, I wrote a Java application this morning that uses the Twitter and Twitpic APIs to download thumbnails and display them in reverse chronological order. Each thumbnail can be clicked to open the photo on Twitpic's site.

The application produces a web page and RSS feed, updated every two minutes.

The application is a mashup that does the following:

1. Downloads a search feed of "twitpic chile" from Twitter in Atom format.
2. Extracts Twitpic URLs from tweets in that feed.
3. Calls the Twitpic API to get the thumbnail of each photo as a JPEG image.
4. Saves the thumbnail to a directory on my server.
5. Produces a web page and feed of the saved thumbnails, sorted using the creation time of its file.

I'll be releasing it under the GPL when it's done. This application includes support for PubSubHubbub, so subscribers can see new photos show up in real time with clients such as Google Reader.

Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:04:04 -0500

Dawn Brancheau, a 40-year-old trainer at SeaWorld in Orlando, was killed today by a killer whale at the beginning of a performance. Eyewitness accounts differ, but she was reportedly dragged into the water, shaken violently and kept underwater until she drowned. The whale, Tilikum, is the largest in captivity and has been involved in two fatal incidents prior to this one. In 1999, a park visitor hid at SeaWorld until closing and jumped into the pool with the whale. The man was found dead in the pool the next morning and had suffered hypothermia and scrapes from being dragged along the pool's bottom. Eight years earlier, Tilikum was one of three whales who drowned Keltie Byrne, a 21-year-old trainer, at Sealand of the Pacific, after she slipped and fell into the pool.

The PBS series Frontline did an story on the issue of killer whale trainer safety in 1995, A Whale of a Business. The web site for the story includes a chapter from the 1992 book The Performing Orca: Why the Show Must Stop by Erich Hoyt.

The chapter makes interesting reading in light of today's events, since it focuses strongly on Byrne's death. Hoyt accuses SeaWorld of covering up training injuries and disregarding evidence that killer whales don't like to be ridden:

... it was all too late for Keltie Byrne. Her parents have decided so far not to sue Sealand, preferring to put the tragedy behind them. The jury at the public inquest was unable to agree on the real cause of Byrne's death, beyond drowning. Why did orcas, which had never killed a trainer in marine parks or in the wild despite thousands of encounters, suddenly kill a human? Was it "an accident waiting to happen," if not at Sealand, then at Sea World or almost any park, especially one where basic safety procedures are overlooked? ...

In September 1991, Sealand owner Bob Wright put the three orcas up for sale. But what marine park wants to take three orcas that killed their trainer? Even before Sealand announced the whales were for sale, Sea World was preparing an application to NMFS to import them.

Hoyt has a web site and remains active on the issue of using killer whales in performances. I asked him a few questions and here's what he told me in email:

I think that this is an awful tragedy for the trainer and her family. But that it is avoidable: orcas do not belong in captivity. What I worry about is that things will be focussed on Tilikum, that he is an older male, and his history of having been involved in the death of two other people. Sea World or others may try to say that it is this one older male whale's fault. There are quite a number of other accidents that could well have been fatal that were caused by other captive orcas, females and males, although they do tend to be animals that have been in the parks for awhile. As I reported in The Performing Orca and also in some detail in Orca: The Whale Called Killer, trainers have noted that orcas start to get bored and go a bit crazy after a few years in captivity. You must imagine a highly intelligent social mammal and a big predator normally travelling 100 kms or more a day, then taken from its family, stripped of its ability to socialize normally, to hunt and to travel. What it has left is its relationship to the trainer, but how long can that really keep them interested? It is not surprising that an animal starved of company and stimulation will pull a trainer into the water, or try to keep them in the pool...even to the point of drowning them. Very sad, but again, we know how to correct this situation. Orcas are too big, too social, too wild to be kept in captivity.

The picture of Dawn Brancheau ran Dec. 30, 2005, in the Orlando Sentinel.

Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:37:38 -0500

On a recent trip to the local Barnes & Noble, I was surprised to see Russell Baker's Growing Up in the autobiography section. The book came out 26 years ago and Baker has faded from the public spotlight since his retirement in 1998 from the New York Times, where he was a popular columnist. I picked the book up, figuring it must be a pretty good memoir to have outlasted the author's fame, and noticed a week later that the bookstore had already reordered a copy.

Baker's book is a great memoir. He tells the story of his childhood growing up in the Depression, which takes him from a rural Virginia shack without electricity or running water to stark poverty in Belleville, New Jersey; and Baltimore, where his widowed mother must rely on the charity of family members to feed the family. Baker, born in 1925, frames the story with his 84-year-old mother's lapse into dementia at a nursing home, which has untethered her from the present and drops her into random points in her life. One day he comes to see her and is met with the question "where's Russell?" In her mind, she'd become a young mother again with a three-year-old boy and a younger sister. Russell's father, who she met when his car broke down leaving the local moonshine distillery, had not yet died in his early thirties from diabetes because insulin wasn't available.

Although the specifics of Baker's childhood are often grim, he writes with a sense of humor about himself that reminded me of Jean Shepherd's narration in the movie A Christmas Story. This is particularly true when he describes how his lack of aptitude for anything else led him to journalism. "The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer," he writes, "and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."

Baker's modesty about his own abilities is misplaced. He writes well, telling the human cost of the Depression through the lives of his relatives. He focuses in particular on his mother and her diminishment of opportunities. A college-educated schoolteacher, she remains jobless for years and can't fulfill her dream of putting the family in their own home until he's almost in college. The Bakers are so poor that at one point she gives up her third child, still an infant, to be raised by childless relatives.

Baker's mother ends up living through her children, leaning hard on Russell to make something of himself and putting him to work on the streets selling the Saturday Evening Post when he's just eight years old. She's so miserly about affection and praise that by the end of the book, I needed a hug. Unfortunately, the story ends with Russell as a newlywed who has not yet made anything of himself as a journalist, so there's never the cathartic third-act moment where the mother makes clear that her sacrifices on behalf of her only son were worth it. That bummed me out.

Although he's retired from the Times and a second gig hosting PBS' Masterpiece Theatre, Baker still writes occasionally for New York Review of Books.

Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:20:30 -0500

After banning the same person more than a dozen times from the Drudge Retort, I decided to experiment with a new site feature this afternoon that turned into a failure of epic proportions. I'm documenting it here so that other people who run online communities will avoid making the same mistake.

Throughout its history, the Retort has attracted a small number of users who delight in creating a large amount of trouble. They want to prove that no moderation system has ever been devised that can hold them. I am not questioning their decision or their singleminded pursuit of this goal. It is important to have hobbies.

When I see a new user show up who acts like somebody I've kicked off, I have written code that determines whether other users have connected to the server with the same IP address. Nine times out of 10, this reveals the user's real identity and I drop the account.

Since Retort users are conscientious about flagging offensive comments, I thought it would be a good idea to let users check whether a user has shared an IP address with others on the site. No IP addresses were revealed. My site checked the addresses associated with a user and posted a report like this:

ToniTennille has used the same IP address as the following users:

• TheCaptain, user level user
• MuskratLove, user level user

Within an hour, it became clear that this was a terrible idea. So terrible, in fact, that I must downplay my own poor judgment by using the passive voice.

Mistake was made.

If an Internet service provider, employer or school assigns IP addresses to its users from a small pool of addresses, people who don't know each other will share the same IP. I thought the Retort wasn't particularly large -- the site has 18,900 users, 1,700 of whom have logged in the past 90 days -- so the chances were slim that users who don't know each other at all would have ever shared an IP address.

Inaccurate conclusion reached.

As it turns out, there are a lot of people who share IP addresses for entirely innocent reasons completely without their knowledge. This was particularly true on my site of people using BlackBerries. Before I took the new feature offline, there were a dozen false positives. The flaw in my thinking is that I only was looking at shared-IP information when I already had reason to suspect that a user was bogus. So I could tell pretty quickly whether I had caught a troublemaker or not. When I wasn't sure, I ignored the information.

Retort users, on the other hand, gleefully checked out everybody and reported back the results, whether or not they made any sense.

I have a good track record with user privacy on my sites. As a general rule, I don't provide any personal information about my users to people who ask, no matter what the reason. As I've told a few lawyers and one police agency, I only would reveal a user's IP address or similar identifying information in response to a court order.

The new feature never revealed any IP addresses. But it was still staggeringly stupid and misleading, and all I can say in my defense is that I recognized the error and killed the experiment 1 hour and 43 minutes after it began.

Apology offered.

Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:42:27 -0500

With a fresh sense of urgency, President Barack Obama sought to reassure seniors Monday about health care legislation approaching a final vote in Congress, pledging it would make preventive care cost-free and close a gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:52:23 GMT

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:52:23 GMT

A torrential rainstorm that brought heavy winds to the Northeast, is causing road and airport disruptions in Boston and other parts of New England.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:25:22 GMT

China's government embraces an increasingly anti-Western tone and adopts policies across a wide spectrum that reflect a heightened fear of foreign influence.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:57:02 GMT

Safety investigators have found no evidence so far to support or disprove a California motorist's claim that his Toyota Prius sped out of control on its own.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:13:35 GMT

In a revealing interview in GQ magazine, Rielle Hunter breaks her silence about her affair with former presidential candidate John Edwards. She says that she viewed Edwards’ running for president despite their affair as “reckless” and that he initially wanted her to abort their baby.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:30:32 GMT

U.S. and Mexican officials have launched an investigation into the killing of an American couple and a Mexican man with ties to the U.S. consulate by suspect drug gang hitmen over the weekend.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:44:07 GMT

Officials say the U.S. is pressing Israel to scrap a contentious Jerusalem building project whose approval has touched off the most serious diplomatic feud with Washington in years.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:26:42 GMT

Detroit city workers will be urged not to wear perfume, cologne or aftershave as a result of a settlement in a federal lawsuit.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:02:15 GMT

An American diplomat based in South Korea fled to the Philippines after facing charges that he swindled a local woman out of nearly $200,000, police say.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:41:24 GMT

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:41:24 GMT

Phillips-Van Heusen has agreed to buy clothing company Tommy Hilfiger for about $3 billion.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:49:03 GMT

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:49:03 GMT

A town in Arizona is missing a 25-year-old bottle of brandy.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:38:21 GMT

More than three years after beekeepers starting seeing the sudden disappearance of hive populations, scientists have yet to find the cause for colony collapse disorder.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:09:58 GMT

President Barack Obama's proposal to overhaul education standards championed by his predecessor aims to broaden the focus beyond math and reading to "a well-rounded education," Education Secretary Arne Duncan says.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:38:55 GMT

WashPost: Thursday and Friday can't get here fast enough because the NCAA tournament is wide, wide open. If we've learned anything over these first two weeks of March, it's that not all that much separates the best from the rest.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:16:21 GMT

When you’re staying at a hotel, is it OK to pocket the bottles of shampoo and lotion? How about the magazines? Bathrobes? Furniture? It all depends on who you ask.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:19:29 GMT

Nepal wants to paint Mount Everest pink.  It wants gay honeymooners trekking through the Himalayas. It wants to host the world's highest same-sex wedding at Everest base camp.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:13:48 GMT

A Shiite extremist group on Monday discounted claims from its former hostage that he was mistreated, presenting a video taken during his two-and-a-half year captivity showing the Briton exercising and playing with a child.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:41:24 GMT

A 38-year-old woman acknowledged Monday killing six of her newborns, whose corpses were found in plastic bags in her basement, at the opening of a chilling trial in northwest France.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:46:41 GMT

A major blackout left most of Chile without power for hours, two weeks after a massive earthquake that killed hundreds and weakened infrastructure.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:32:45 GMT

There’s old saying: power corrupts. And a new Columbia Business School study titled, “People with Power are Better Liars,” finds there may be some truth behind the cliché.

Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:22:39 GMT

One of Osama bin Laden's sons has called on Iran's supreme leader to release members of his family believed to be under house arrest there since they fled Afghanistan in 2001, according to a letter posted Monday on the Internet.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:05:51 GMT

Just miles from downtown Los Angeles sits a large urban oilfield. Nearby residents thought that, once drained, the field would become a park. That day now appears distant.

Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:52:05 GMT

America’s largest, three-week office pool starts getting sorted out Tuesday with an opening-round game between Arkansas-Pine Bluff and Winthrop. The tournament goes into full swing Thursday, with Kansas the No. 1 seed.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:17:57 GMT

President Barack Obama, to help pay for his health care overhaul package, is proposing that high-income Americans pay Medicare taxes on the money they make on their investments. Here are some basic questions and answers about this little-discussed provision that could affect millions of people.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:14:46 GMT

Actor was best known for his portrayal of Jim Phelps, leader of a gang of special agents who battled evil conspirators in the long-running television series "Mission: Impossible."

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:05:19 GMT