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This are the shocking scenes that have led some people to accuse the Occupy Wall Street protesters living rough in New York's financial district of creating unsanitary and filthy conditions. Exclusive pictures obtained by Mail Online show one demonstrator relieving himself on a police car. Elsewhere we found piles of stinking refuse clogging Zucotti Park, despite the best efforts of many of the protestors to keep the area clean. The shocking images demonstrate the extent to which conditions have deteriorated as demonstrations in downtown Manhattan enter their fourth week.

INDIANAPOLIS -- The Indiana Supreme Court on Tuesday reaffirmed its earlier ruling in a controversial case involving unlawful police entry. The court granted a rehearing, then supplied a five-page opinion on its May 12 opinion that declared that Hoosiers no longer had a legal right to resist police officers who enter their home without a legal basis to do so.

A day after presenting Congress with legislation for his $447 billion jobs proposal, President Barack Obama will visit an Ohio school to showcase the plan's $25 billion for modernizing public schools nationwide. The president will talk about how a multimillion-dollar modernization at the Fort Hayes Arts and Academic High School in Columbus, which he will visit today, has improved the environment in which students learn while creating local jobs, Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said. The administration estimates the school plan would create hundreds of thousands of construction, engineering and maintenance jobs and help as many as 35,000 public...

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans unexpectedly pledged an immediate review of President Barack Obama's jobs proposals on Friday as he launched a public campaign for urgent passage of his day-old $447 billion program of tax cuts and new spending. "The time for gridlock and games is over," the president declared. "Nothing radical in this bill," Obama told a large crowd at the University of Richmond on the afternoon after his dramatic speech to Congress. "Everything in it will put more people back to work and more money back in the pockets of those who are working. Everything in it will...

The head of the U.S. Postal Service said in an interview that the organization will default -- perhaps as early as this winter -- unless Congress intervenes. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe's comments reflect a well-known reality that the Postal Service is in dire financial straits. The rise of email and online bill-paying has steadily eroded its profits over the years while labor costs soar. Donahoe is calling for a host of changes, including the elimination of Saturday delivery, to close a deficit projected to top $9 billion this year. But he said Congress needs to step in to help keep...

FOR the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street... --snip-- Bloomberg reported that the Fed had provided a stunning $1.2 trillion to large global financial institutions at the peak of its crisis lending in December 2008. --snip-- In 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland received $84.5 billion, and Dexia, a Belgian lender, borrowed $58.5 billion from the Fed at... --snip-- Mr. Todd also questioned the Fed’s decision to...

President Obama’s much-anticipated jobs speech will undoubtedly cover more of the same things that already haven’t not worked. He will propose an infrastructure bank, extension of unemployment and food stamps, promotion of green jobs, more government-corporate partnerships, and a one-year extension of the payroll tax reduction. He’ll advocate a second stimulus. He may be flanked by his jobs commission, headed by the CEO of General Electric, which earlier issued a lame interim jobs report. His speech will not be about jobs. Instead, it will be a campaign speech in disguise. Obama cannot propose a real jobs program. His constituents would...

Despite a politically and economically tumultuous start to the month of August, CEO confidence stayed steadily pessimistic. Although the index did rise – for the first time in months and by only 0.4 percent—it still remains at a low 5.30 out of a possible 10. The Index, Chief Executive’s monthly gauge of CEOs’ perceptions of overall business conditions, has seen a 17 percent drop from February’s 2011 high of 6.39. Now, only 45.3 percent of CEOs expect business conditions to be at least ‘good’ in the next year, up from July’s 41 percent. Despite the debt ceiling drama and the...

Politics: These days, what would a firm that outsourced 400,000 U.S. jobs be called? The answer: labor union. Monday's Canada-Colombia free-trade pact is its masterpiece. Leo Gerard, the proudly Canadian president of the United Steelworkers Union, is one of many who ought to stand up and take a bow. He and his fellow Big Labor union bosses loudly opposed the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, using their political muscle to keep the already-negotiated deal on ice in Congress and the White House for nearly five years. It's come at a massive cost to American workers' jobs. Gerard's native land put its...

Stocks finished near session lows in choppy trading Wednesday, with the Dow and S&P wiping out all of the previous session's gains led by financials, as investors continued to cautiously monitor developments in the European banks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down over 500 points, wiping out the previous session's 429-point rally. The blue-chip index has had triple-digit moves in four of the last five trading days. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also finished sharply lower. The CBOE Volatility Index, widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, soared more than 25 percent.

Stocks took a sharp nosedive in another choppy day Monday to finish at session lows as investors fled from risky assets following S&P's downgrade of U.S.'s credit rating last week in addition to ongoing economic jitters.

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SHANGHAI — China, the largest foreign holder of United States debt, said Saturday that Washington needed to “cure its addiction to debts” and “live within its means,” just hours after the rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s long-term debt. The harshly worded commentary, which was released by China’s official Xinhua news agency, was Beijing’s latest effort to express its displeasure with Washington. (snip) “The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone,” read the...

  Many of us never thought that the Republicans would hold tough long enough to get President Obama and the Democrats to agree to a budget deal that does not include raising income tax rates. But they did — and Speaker of the House John Boehner no doubt desires much of the credit for that.Despite the widespread notion that raising tax rates automatically means collecting more revenue for the government, history says otherwise. As far back as the 1920s, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon pointed out that the government received a very similar amount of revenue from high-income...

If it had been a scene in “Atlas Shrugged,” the guy would have disappeared into the secrecy of Colorado with a shadowy figure who we would later learn to be John Galt. In real life, the story will probably be more complex. But I wonder how long it’s going to be before businesspeople really do start walking away and deciding it’s not worth doing business in America today. Or it it already happening and we just don’t know it? The man you see in the picture at the right is named Ronnie Bryant. He operates coal mines in Alabama. I’d...

(Washington, DC) -- Republican congressional leaders are reportedly agreeing to billions of dollars in revenue increases as federal deficit discussions continue. Republican Senator Jon Kyl announced the move today saying revenue increases don't necessarily mean tax hikes. On the Senate floor Kyl said, quote, "If the government sells something and gets revenue from it, that's revenue." He also suggested user fees for government services could provide additional revenue. He says all the revenue increases Republicans have agreed to amount to between 150 billion and 200 billion dollars.