Ladies and gentlemen, the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain.

They also rock Shaft, Psycho Killer and Teenage Dirtbag. When they played London's Royal Albert Hall in 2009, the sold-out crowd of 6,000 included 1,000 people who brought ukeleles to accompany them on Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:32:12 -0400

We here at Studio B did not run the video and did not reference the story in any way for many reasons, among them: we didn't know who shot it, we didn't know when it was shot, we didn't know the context of the statement, and because of the history of the videos on the site where it was posted, in short we do not and did not trust the source.

-- Fox News anchor Shepard Smith on Andrew Breitbart

By virtue of publishing the Drudge Retort, I've been following the career of Andrew Breitbart for more than a decade. His rise to prominence from Matt Drudge's uncredited collaborator to liberal-hating firebrand has been quite remarkable, given the fact that he's just a self-made web publisher who never held a job of any importance in media, politics or academia.

By his own admission, he was an aimless and frustrated college graduate in the mid-'90s when he discovered the Internet and decided to reinvent himself on it:

"I said to myself, 'O.K., you are going on a date tonight, and you are not going to bed until you have gone all the way.' And I remember hooking up to the World Wide Web that night, and it was a revelation. It was just like shooting yourself into outer space, and trying to latch onto anyone else who was out there. I remember finding weather sites and earthquake sites, and being able to monitor earthquakes in real time, and that was weirdly invigorating."

I did not expect that Breitbart would rise as far as he has, but now that he's obliterated his reputation with an ugly racial smear against a decent woman in government service, I think the seeds of his destruction have been in place for years.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about how enraged he is all the time:

All external indicators would suggest that Breitbart has a lot to be happy about, but I've followed his work for years and he operates in a constant state of anger at the perceived mistreatment of conservatives, particularly in Hollywood. Since he's around my age, he's lived during an era in which the right wing was ascendant in American politics. I'm not sure he could have survived the '60s and '70s, back when conservatism was the marginalized ideology of Barry Goldwater and washed-up B-movie actors.

Four months ago, I documented how Breitbart has been lying to the media for years:

... Breitbart [has] the good fortune to work in online agenda-driven journalism, where no one is ever held accountable for being wrong. Breitbart lied back then, lied about the ACORN sting and will probably lie in furtherance of the next scoop he peddles to the mainstream media.

He can't be trusted.

I wonder how long it will take the Times and the rest of the major media to figure that out.

There are political points I could score here, since Breitbart's hatred of liberals makes it satisfying to enjoy his fall from grace. But as a self-made web publisher myself, I find it disappointing that he won't simply apologize to Shirley Sherrod and admit a mistake.

He managed to turn his association with Drudge into a huge media platform and doesn't have to answer to anyone. There's no reason he has to be as nakedly self-preservational as the major media, the way the New York Times and USA Today acted when caught publishing Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley's fictional news stories, as if the entire reputation of the papers would collapse like a house of cards if they engaged in open self-criticism.

Breitbart is his own boss. He appears to be rolling in dough. He has Founding Father hair. What good is being a self-employed media mogul if you can't admit you fucked up and try to make it right?

Related:

• Scott Rosenberg: "The problem with Breitbart is not that he is an activist in journalist clothes, but rather that he is a serial purveyor of deceptions who is somehow still viewed as a legitimate source by some of his colleagues in the media."

Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:38:20 -0400

Clinton Gallagher recently posted a blistering tirade against me in the comments of Workbench. He thinks that I'm part of a dishonest campaign against Dave Winer and the RssCloud element:

Cadenhead you are being a jerk putting words in the mouth of Dave Winer --again-- as those of us who used to read the RSS mailing lists can attest; so herein I speak for myself in this regard.Secondly, if you were as professional as you imply Cadenhead --and-- if you were an all-around decent kind of fair play fella (which you are having a problem with) you would use your ill-deserved name recognition to expose the fact that the feed validator at feedvalidator.org has been coded by the sleazy-weasel(s) Sam Ruby et al. to undermine RSS. ...

It is only your dishonesty, the lack of information, the lack of coding skills of the typical web developer and the bully pulpit that causes the rssCloud element to now appear as if must be relegated to the back seat.

I'd like to see rssCloud have a fair chance, the developers of WordPress agree and support rssCloud too so gfy Roger.

Normally I'd have some fun with his over-the-top personal attack and Winer psychodrama, but I'm completely bored with that stuff. RSS is eleven years old. Winer and his BFFs have their view and the RSS Advisory Board has ours. We endorsed the Feed Validator and wrote an RSS Profile to help publishers and developers adopt the format with a minimum of aggravation.

For people like Gallagher who think we suck rocks, the validator is open source and the profile is licensed under Creative Commons. If you hate Sam Ruby, hate me or hate the RSS board, you can use our own work to put us in our place. Though I must warn you there's no money in it and the RSS community is painfully short on groupies, if you don't mind that, knock yourself out.

As for RssCloud, it is now a year since Winer tried to revive it and he's never bothered to write a specification for all the changes he was making. Life is too short to waste time implementing his half-assed ideas. I use PubSubHubbub for real-time RSS support in my software. It's well-specified and it works great.

Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:49:40 -0400

The recent firings of Dave Weigel by the Washington Post and Octavia Nasr by CNN show that mainstream journalists, who are expected to display some personality and attitude on social media to better connect to the audience, will be fired the minute they make an important group mad. I don't envy the job of a reporter at a major media outlet pressed into blogging or tweeting for the company.

Conservative journalist James Poulos sums up the predicament well:

Writers now have competing pressures -- to be witty, quick, ironic, noticeable, flip, to dispatch every clay pigeon tossed up by a culture pandemic with pigeons; but also to self-edit, to self-moderate, to be reticent at the right time, to pussyfoot expertly, to pick battles, to avoid perils, to besmirch rarely, to duck blame, to satisfy spectral overseers. This is a serious pickle, is it not? And yet it now appears to be the cost of doing business. Possibly, this is the internet imitating life.

I found this great quote in a funny fake media orientation video.

Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:49:52 -0400

The DMCA copyright battle between the Associated Press and the Drudge Retort took place two years ago, but Woot CEO Matt Rutledge remembered it in a blog post this week.

Rutledge noticed that when AP covered the sale of his company to Amazon.Com, it quoted from his blog.

The AP, we can't thank you enough for looking our way. You see, when we showed off our good news on Wednesday afternoon, we expected we'd get a little bit of attention. But when we found your little newsy thing you do, we couldn't help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn't that the very thing you've previously told nu-media bloggers they’re not supposed to do?

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we've figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. ...

We're major digital players now. Don't force us to pass this matter to a collection agency.

In response to Rutledge's mockery, I can only say woot!

Two years ago, when the AP was taking a massive barrage of criticism over using the DMCA to squash the free speech rights of blogs and social news sites, the wire service told Saul Hansell of the New York Times that it was going to produce fair use guidelines for bloggers.

The Associated Press, one of the nation's largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.'s copyright.

AP never produced those guidelines. My gut feeling at the time was that AP would wait for the issue to blow over and forget it made that promise, because the company sells headline-and-lead syndication packages around the world. Telling people they might possibly be able to quote its stories without getting sued undercuts its business.

Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:38:42 -0400

A reader comment by Fabius Cunctator to an op-ed column against gay marriage:

Homosexuals do not achieve psychological satisfaction by engaging in same-sex sex. That is the reason that homosexuals are highly promiscuous compared to heterosexuals. Homosexuals can desire sex again only one or two hours after same-sex because they are not psychologically satisfied by their sex. Heterosexuals often can go for days, weeks or months before desiring sex again because they have achieved psychological satisfaction from their last physical sex act.

So heterosexual sex is so satisfying that one can go months without wanting to do it again. Homosexual sex, on the other hand, is so unsatisfying that it's desired as soon as one hour later.

He goes on to tell a married man of 20-plus years that having sex with his wife every 2-3 days is "abnormally frequent sex."

My condolences to Mrs. Cunctator.

Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:29:15 -0400

This year's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers by Paul Harding, is one of the best I've read in years. The slim 191-page book is about the last eight days of dying clock repairman George Washington Crosby, whose hallucinating mind wanders across time in his final hours, stopping at disordered points in his life and that of his father.

The first novel by Harding, Tinkers was rejected by numerous publishers and sat in a drawer for several years before it found a home at Bellevue Literary Press, an obscure non-profit publisher based in New York's Bellevue Hospital. It's the first book from a small press to win the Pulitzer since John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces in 1981.

I don't often like awardbait -- difficult literary novels with spare plots seemingly tailored for award consideration -- but the language of Tinkers is as exquisite as a T.S. Eliot poem. Harding is at his most evocative when describing the workings of an antique clock or the natural wonder of the New England countryside, yet the entire book is written with an tinkerer's eye towards the world. There may never be a more eyebrow-curling description of halitosis than when George's father Howard pulls the tooth of a suffering hermit who buys from his tinker's wagon: "A breeze caught the hermit's breath and Howard gasped and saw visions of slaughter-houses and dead pets under porches." When George witnesses his father's epileptic seizure at the dinner table on Christmas Day, it's a perfectly described moment of absolute terror -- and you can see why he's taking it to the grave.

At times, Tinkers wanders into pure existential reverie, like these thoughts from George's father as he drags his wagon of goods from one rural homestead to another:

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

I wasn't sure about this novel until I was 50 pages in, and even briefly considered abandoning it for fare more light than an old man's deathbed vigil. The cumulative impact of passage after passage like the above convinced me that Tinkers was a masterwork that would be cherished for generations, like a centuries-old grandfather clock.

Related posts:

• The New York Times, which did not review Tinkers, tells the story of its publication

Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 17:26:27 -0400

On Tuesday I visited five Congressional offices in the Capitol to make the case for small publishers who rely on targeted Internet ads for revenue, an event that rated a story in Politico. The Interactive Advertising Bureau invited web entrepreneurs to come to DC and meet members of Congress and their aides, hoping to make the point that thousands of Americans are running businesses powered by these ads. We're one of the only sectors of the economy that's been growing during this recession.

Although I had to pay my own travel and hotel costs, I accepted the invitation to tell the story of the Drudge Retort. As a former newspaper journalist, I've been able to run a social news site that receives two million visits a month because of the revenue generated by online ads. My wife lost her job as a reporter in a layoff two years ago, and we've endured the tough economic times with the help of the site.

There are a lot of Americans running web-based businesses in circumstances like ours. Reporting jobs are disappearing, so we've started our own media empire out of the house.

With several web publishers and a lawyer for the IAB as chaperone, I met aides for Reps. Diane DeGette (D-Colo.), Michael Castle (R-Del.), Bill Young (D-Fl.), Charlie Melancon (D-La.) and Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). We wandered around a catacomb of ancient underground hallways that connect the Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon buildings where members of Congress work, getting 10-15 minutes with each aide to argue that proposed new legislation would crush our businesses, send jobs overseas and cause web advertising to be considerably more annoying than it is today. There's an Internet privacy bill by Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), currently being circulated as a draft, that could be interpreted to require every bit of targeting in online marketing to be opt-in.

Although that sounds OK in principle, in practice there's a lot of personalization going on today thanks to anonymous cookies, IP addresses and the relationships customers build with online sites. Dell sends an email to you offering a warranty extension for your laptop. Google delivers local restaurant ads based on the geographic location of your IP address. An Amazon shopper who buys the latest Justin Bieber album is told he might also enjoy earplugs.

I thought I did OK in the meetings, though it's a challenge to pitch the public benefit of something that's so obviously tied to your own self-interest. I was reminded of the old saying that "what's good for IBM is good for America."

Before I went to the Capitol, I sought advice from the members of the Retort, getting all manner of helpful and not-so-helpful suggestions. One comment from Dirk, a libertarian member of the site, gave me something to talk about in several meetings.

At the end of the day the internet is about servicing humanity through the vital sharing of information. Government intrusion only hinders this important service that you provide. ...

Right makes might and you are in the right. This is "a unique medium for humanity to share information and ideas" don't let anyone compare it to any other areas of communication that have been regulated in the past and if they attempt to point out where those forms of communication have died off.

If you've spent any time on the Retort, you know that it's a cantankerous community of people of all political stripes who show up each day to yell at each other about the news of the day. And yell at me.

But one thing the members do agree on is that the Retort and thousands of other independent blogs are an important vehicle for free expression. The third-party ads that run on the site leave me beholden to no one, because I'm not required to directly solicit advertisers and other entities for support. The stories that run on the site are based on my own editorial judgment and that of the users who contribute their own links. The users of the site are as invested in the success of this business model as I am.

Although I did not get to meet a member of Congress in an official capacity, while crammed into one of the Capitol's tiny elevators in the Rayburn building, I accidentally elbowed a well-dressed mustachioed gentleman square in the nose. He had been graciously helping us find the tunnel to the Longworth building.

I found out later he was Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas).

Related posts:

• Todd Curl (another event attendee): The Pungent Aroma of Democracy

Credit: The photo of the U.S. Capitol tunnel going to the Cannon Building was taken by Indianagal.

Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:23:25 -0400

I'm in Woodbridge, Va., this morning about to head out to the Long Tail Alliance Fly-In, a gathering of small web publishers organized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Google. As a publisher who uses context-based advertising on the Drudge Retort and other sites, I was invited to come to DC and meet with members of Congress to talk about why this form of advertising is important to online media.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has concerns that Congress is working on regulations that would kick this form of advertising in the fiddly parts:

Political campaigns have been launched at the federal and state levels to seek government regulation of many of the core processes and technologies that support interactive advertising. The IAB believes a disproportionately negative impact would be felt by small publishers whose advertising sales are largely or entirely managed by ad networks. This would affect advertising revenues and potentially diminish the diversity of voices and ideas on this most diverse of communications media.

I'll be liveblogging the event on Twitter using hashtag #iabdc. Follow me on Twitter to live this adventure in real time.

I don't know yet who I'll be meeting (Michelle Bachmann! Michelle Bachmann! Michelle Bachmann!). As the publisher of a liberal-leaning web site that calls itself "Red Meat for Yellow Dogs," it could be amusingly awkward if I get some conservative Republicans.

Then again, I'm here on my own dime trying to keep my bidness free of government regulation. So I'm practically speaking Republican already.

Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:42:26 -0400

On May 28, BP-employed reporter Paula Kolmar filed this dispatch from a shrimping vessel hired to skim oil from the Gulf of Mexico before it reached Alabama's coastline:

Over about four hours we, all guests of Gulf Coast native Captain Wade and his local crew, enjoyed the spectacular ballet at sea. ...

Watching the captains weave the long black boom as seamlessly as a professional ballet troupe performs an intricate dance, I found it difficult to believe that the rehearsals only started some weeks ago. ...

Gently caressing the sea surface, the three vessels circled and swirled, guiding the boom without changing the design.

A ballet at sea as mesmerising as any performance in a concert hall, and worthy of an audience in its own right.

If you'd like to see the ballet, made possible by a contribution of 40,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, it will be running through August and may be extended into the fall.

Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:47:01 -0400

The seven-week break I took on Workbench, which just ended 11 words ago, is the longest since I began my personal blog in 1999. I'm doing some work in social media these days and thinking about launching a new company to commercialize software I've been developing for my own use the past six years. I also am deep into the manuscript for a new edition of Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours.

My absence did not make Target employees fonder, as a recent comment to my five-year-old tale of shopping humiliation demonstrates:

Lady,

You and your disgusting, obnoxious kids are the reason people hate working at Target. You come in, with your head up your ass, while your kids act like monsters, and then are offended when an employee has the audacity to mention it to you. Is it your goal to come into the store and make everyone else around you miserable? Please, do us Team Member's a favor and take your business elsewhere.

Sincerely,

A Fed-up Employee

Sorry to tell you this, FU, but my kids and I still shop at Target. I'd rather be harangued by teen-aged girls every time I visit the store than get within a mile of Wal-Mart. With your attitude and the fact you searched Google for the term Target sucks to find me, you're never going to become a Leader on Duty.

Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:20:48 -0400

In a draft of his upcoming book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, the economist Bryan Caplan mentions that he'd like to clone and raise himself:

I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally. Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet. Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I'm sure we'd share. I'm confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me. I'm not pushing others to clone themselves. I'm not asking anyone else to pay for my dream. I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone. Is that too much to ask?

I'm surprised that Caplan takes it as a given that his son would be "delighted" by such a scenario. His clone wouldn't be raised by the same parents that he was, but instead would have a father with an extreme sense of his child's likes, dislikes, talents and flaws. That influence -- likely to be domineering and a little creepy -- would produce a much different person over the span of a childhood than how he turned out.

Caplan writes that he has twin sons, but they must not be very old yet or he'd realize that his clone will reject some of dad's traits on principle. Kids have a natural inclination to do things differently than their parents. With my three partial clones, if I'm trying to persuade them to try an activity or a hobby, the least persuasive argument I can use is that I liked it when I was their age.

So no matter how many genes we share, none of my sons will watch One Life to Live with me.

Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:52:50 -0400

San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Mark Fiore won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday for his animated political cartoons. His work appears exclusively online, so it's the first time a non-print cartoonist has won the Pulitzer in its history.

One of his submitted cartoons was Science-Gate, which mocks the scandal over the ClimateGate emails in the style of an overheated political ad.

All of the quotes scribbled by the scientists in this cartoon are real, including a jaw-dropping one by the 16th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler about how he had sex with a virgin:

I suffered continually from skin ailments, often severe sores, often from the scabs of chronic putrid wounds in my feet which healed badly and kept breaking out again. On the middle finger of my right hand I had a worm, on the left a huge sore. ... At Cupinga's I was offered union with a virgin; on New Year's Eve I achieved this with the greatest possible difficulty, experiencing the most acute pains of the bladder.

This Kepler quote comes from an essay by Evan S. Connell printed in his book The Aztec Treasure House.

Kepler was 21 when he started the New Year off with a bang. He suffered from "boils, mange, smallpox, hemorrhoids, constant stomach trouble, and such bad eyesight that he often saw his world doubled or quadrupled," Connell writes. "He seems to have been impatient, sarcastic, cowardly and stingy, and he almost never bathed."

Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:32:55 -0400

Jonathan Bourne discovered something funny on the web site of David Benning, the Republican running for Congress against Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

Take a look at this photo of Benning, his wife and an unidentified couple in front of the famous door of Air Force One:

The photo is displayed on Benning's about page, where it has the filename airforceone.jpg. But as Bourne reveals, Benning wasn't actually rubbing elbows with the president and other high fliers:

Turns out the photo is of SAM 27000, the decommissioned Air Force One that has been an attraction at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley since 2005.

Anyone willing to pay the $12 admission fee can get his photo taken in front of the former Air Force One (copies of the photos are extra). How do I know this? Well, I had my photo taken with the Presidential prop last January.

Not only did Benning spend time on Air Force One, he was also SportsToday magazine's athlete of the year.

Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:42:05 -0400

The web site Credit Reporting & Debt Collection News claims that Chrystal A. Snow's $8.1 million debt collector judgment is a function of Texas law that would not be possible under the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA):

The FDCPA does NOT allow for PUNITIVE damages unless it is a CLASS ACTION.

The lack of punitive damages is a MAJOR flaw in the FDCPA. Debt collectors and debt buyers have NOTHING to worry about in MOST states, with California and Texas being notable exceptions.

The "up to" $1,000 in statutory damages in the FDCPA leaves collectors laughing all the way to their offshore bank accounts.

There's an amazing amount of litigation being pursued in debt collection, both by collectors pursuing unpaid debt and consumers claiming legal violations in how they've been treated.

In January, the Dallas Observer profiled Craig Cunningham, a Dallas man heavily in debt who has made thousands of dollars suing debt collectors:

While most Americans with unpaid bills dread the collector's call, Cunningham sees them as lucrative opportunities. Many collection and credit card companies, intentionally or not, violate little-known consumer rights laws, and Cunningham's favorite pastime is catching them doing so and then suing them. ...

While the FTC gets the bulk of consumer complaints, today more consumers are fighting back with their own lawsuits than ever before. In 2009, nearly 10,000 cases under FDCPA, FCRA or TCPA statutes were filed around the country, mostly in federal courts. That's a 50 percent increase from 2008, and an 83 percent growth from 2007.

A cottage industry has sprung up to counter the flood of cases. Two new companies now offer the credit and collection industries databases of repeat plaintiffs filing under the FDCPA.

Cunningham represents himself in the suits. He's suing one collector for $200,000 over how it pursued a $79.84 Time Warner bill.

Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:13:31 -0400

After welcome signs of growth in housing earlier this year, home sales — and prices — are likely to wilt again in the summer heat, a victim of rising foreclosures and weak demand.



Real estate pricing - Business - Country music - Real estate - Business and Economy

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:09:26 GMT

The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will no longer be able to make the information private.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:59:38 GMT

Arizona and Fremont, Neb., are at the forefront of the movement by governments to get tough with illegal immigrants. But they are learning that passing a law is far from enough.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:00:50 GMT

Parts of Arizona's controversial immigration law went into effect Thursday, after a judge blocked the heart of the measure, defusing a confrontation between police and activists.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:26:29 GMT

A senior U.S. military official and Afghan officials say the body of a second U.S. sailor who went missing in a dangerous part of eastern Afghanistan has been recovered.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:44:36 GMT

A woman who was attacked by a bear in the middle of the night at a busy campground was bitten on her arm and leg before she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone, she said Thursday.



Yellowstone National Park - Montana - Camping - Gallatin National Forest - United States

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:59:47 GMT

The calls from fellow Democrats for New York Rep. Charles Rangel to resign could quickly turn from a trickle to a flood unless he can quickly negotiate a plea bargain to prevent a congressional trial on allegations of ethical misconduct.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:24:56 GMT

The chief official at the port where a Japanese tanker was docked a day after it was damaged at the mouth of the Persian Gulf said Thursday investigators now believe the ship was involved in a collision.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:27:15 GMT

New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits fell slightly more than expected last week, government data showed on Thursday.



Jobless claims - Unemployment benefits - Insurance - Unemployment - Financial Services

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:16:36 GMT

Four airmen were killed in a cargo plane that crashed during a training run at an Air Force base, military authorities said Thursday.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:04:20 GMT

The government's point man for the Gulf spill plans to meet with coastal parish officials Thursday to talk about what's next now that the oil has stopped flowing.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:14:24 GMT

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:14:24 GMT

A French couple was expected to appear in court Thursday after police found the corpses of eight newborn babies in a village in northern France.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:29:27 GMT

A mother broke down in tears as she was reunited with her baby girl six months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:01:21 GMT

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:01:21 GMT

Toyota is recalling 412,000 passenger cars, mostly the Avalon model, in the U.S. for steering problems in which three accidents have been reported, the automaker said Thursday.



Toyota - United States - Toyota Avalon - Automobile - Makes and Models

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:57:32 GMT

A package addressed from "Grandpa Henderson" in San Diego to "Grandma Henderson" in Talladega, Ala., wasn't ordinary mail, and it wasn't picked up by any grandmother.



San Diego - United States - Organizations - History - Law

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:39:46 GMT

Houston Astros - Roy Oswalt - Philadelphia Phillies - United States - Jayson Werth

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:25:52 GMT

Hundreds of firefighters gained ground against the most destructive of two big wildfires that have burned homes and forced 2,300 people to evacuate rural areas north of Los Angeles.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:03:59 GMT

Former “Bachelorette” contestant Justin “R-Rated” Rego believes producers of the reality romance competition have it out for him.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:15:17 GMT

A former money manager pleaded guilty Wednesday to securities fraud, admitting that he cheated charities, schools, pension funds and others out of at least $331 million.



Securities fraud - Plea - Investment management - Law - Legal Information

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:11:00 GMT

The ladies of "The View" had plenty of questions for the president, but they all wanted to know if he'd be at Chelsea's wedding this weekend. The answer: No, and he thinks the day should belong to Chelsea.

Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:30:17 GMT

Rivers burst their banks during monsoon rains, washing away streets, battering a dam and killing at least 60 people in the most severe floods in decades in northwest Pakistan, officials said Thursday. Hundreds of thousands more were stranded as rescue workers struggled to reach far-flung villages.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:48:08 GMT

The U.S. economic recovery will remain slow deep into next year, held back by shoppers not spending and employers not hiring, according to an AP survey of leading economists.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:53:42 GMT

At least one police officer and two suspects were killed Wednesday when a gunbattle erupted  during an undercover drug operation in Phoenix, police said.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:46:25 GMT

Russians may now face jail time for crimes they have not yet committed under a new security law signed Thursday by President Dmitry Medvedev.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:51:33 GMT

A fan wearing a Miami Heat jersey of LeBron James drew the ire of the crowd at a Cleveland Indians game and was escorted out of the ballpark.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:49:12 GMT

A hacker has discovered a way to force ATMs to disgorge their cash by hijacking the computers inside them.



Automated teller machine - Black Hat - hack - Business - Financial Services

Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:25:22 GMT

Just weeks after lowering the price of the Kindle e-book reader from $259 to $189, Amazon unveiled a fully revamped Kindle on Wednesday. It's sleeker, better looking, easier on the eyes — and starts at $139.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:33:18 GMT

A string of shark sightings over the past few weeks has rattled swimmers in Massachusetts at the height of the summer vacation season and sparked memories of the "Jaws" movie hysteria.



Jaws - Massachusetts - Shark - United States - Recreation

Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:16:59 GMT