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U.S. stocks tumbled Monday morning to their lowest level in 22 months as a fresh drop in oil prices amid continuing fears of economic slowdown pushed investors to the perceived safety of government bonds and gold. "Is the market throwing out the baby with the bath water?"said James Meyer, chief investment officer at Tower Bridge Advisors, referring to the "rapid fall in prices for the high flying tech and biotech names that have been leading the market for the past 12 months." "The former leaders of the previous bull cycle are the ones that get taken to the woodshed in...

Drought conditions may be the default position of the American Southwest now, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters. A study of the region from 1979 through 2014 shows that drier conditions have set in as lower precipitation has become the norm, and it is expected to continue.

Steve Forbes ran for president twice -- in 1996 and 2000 -- spending a reported $69 million of his own money in failed bids to win the Republican nomination. His campaigns mostly focused on establishing a flat income tax and other similar economic reforms. The multi-millionaire chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media isn't running for president this time around, but he does have a new book out this week (Reviving America), promoting three big reforms he believes America should adopt: repeal and replace Obamacare with something akin to a free-market health-care system; scrapping the Federal income tax code in favor...

A Super Bowl ad promoting tourism in Colonial Williamsburg made a questionable choice in showing video of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The commercial, which aired in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, begins with reversed footage of achievements throughout American history:

Donald Trump said Sunday that there's one issue on which he and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) agree: trade. In a CNN interview Sunday, Trump pointed out that he and Sanders both opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the multinational trade agreement brokered by the Obama administration. The deal aims to reduce tariffs and put legal standards in place in the 12 participating countries. "The one thing we very much agree on is trade. We both agree that we are getting ripped off by China, by Japan, by Mexico, everyone we do business with," Trump said. But though the mogul suggested that he...

Pennsylvania will be about $6 billion short of being able to fund all the projects legislators promised their constituents during passage of Act 89, the transportation funding bill of 2013. Secretary Leslie Richards will break the news to the Senate Transportation Committee when she testifies Tuesday, according to a copy of her testimony obtained by the Tribune-Review. Pennsylvania's 12-year transportation plan covers about 2,800 projects at a cost of about $34 billion. But that exceeds the $28 billion in revenue projected to come in for that time frame. “The Corbett administration over promised projects by at least $6 billion compared...

..... The Republican presidential candidate has repeatedly said that "Muslims love him" despite his provocative policies, but has so far failed to name any single individual Muslim supporter. Asked by the Telegraph to elaborate, Mr Trump again ducked the question responding: "Oh, I could give you about 20 of them."... Donald Trump Junior, Mr Trump's son, was also unable to tell the Telegraph who his father's Muslim friends were, saying only that they had "completed a lot of business deals" in the Middle East.

The most interesting question this year for political junkies is who - if anyone - can rebuild Ronald Reagan's electoral coalition. Plenty of candidates would like to do it, and plenty of them want to convince America right now that they're already doing it. But the key group of voters who could make that happen are up for grabs - and they're skeptical. The big cultural story of the year, it's now clear, is how elites and intellectuals now abruptly admit that downwardly mobile middle-class whites, especially men, have become an important constituency and a political problem. "As we know,"...

Link only, per agreement with Gannett

Presidential elections are about, above all, just two things: our security and our prosperity. Promises of prosperity have all but faded into the background... except by Donald Trump. In the last debate in which he participated Donald Trump hit the voters' target bull's eye in stating "I want to use that same up here, whatever it may be, to make America rich again." None of the other candidates came close to featuring The Message we voters wish to hear. Prosperity. If the other candidates - most notably #2 Ted Cruz - wished to gain the voters' hearts, or at least...

This year's Republican presidential race has generated an unusual number of unusually bad ideas -- Donald Trump on Muslims, Ted Cruz on carpet bombing, Marco Rubio on male footwear. It has also has produced one of the best: Jeb Bush's 4 percent plan. No, that wasn't his desired share of the vote in the Iowa caucus, where he got less than 3 percent. It's his goal for annual economic growth, which he argues would "restore the opportunity for every American to rise and achieve earned success." When Bush said last June, "There is not a reason in the world why...

Iran wants to recover tens of billions of dollars it is owed by India and other buyers of its oil in euros and is billing new crude sales in euros, too, looking to reduce its dependence on the U.S. dollar following last month's sanctions relief. A source at state-owned National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) told Reuters that Iran will charge in euros for its recently signed oil contracts with firms including French oil and gas major Total, Spanish refiner Cepsa and Litasco, the trading arm of Russia's Lukoil. "In our invoices we mention a clause that buyers of our oil...

Following attacks from primary rival Jeb Bush about his past use of eminent domain, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump on Sunday accused the Bush family of using the practice to build a baseball stadium in Texas. "Eminent domain is a very important thing," Trump said on ABC's "This Week." "Jeb Bush doesn't understand what it means, and if you look into the Bush family - I found this five minutes ago - they used eminent domain for the stadium in Texas, where they own, I guess, a piece of the Texas Rangers." When host George Stephanopoulos said that was Jeb's...

Austria's Finance Minister Hans-Joerg Schelling has asked the European Commission to provide 600 million euros ($670 million) to cover the costs of taking in additional refugees, a ministry spokesman said on Saturday. Austria budgeted for 35,000 asylum seekers annually at a cost of 11,000 euros per person but took in some 90,000 people in 2015, the spokesman quoted the minister as saying in a letter to the head of the EU executive, Jean-Claude Juncker. "Concerning the migration crisis it is high time the Commission returned to its normal function as an independent institution representing the general Community interest and start...

The United States could lower carbon emissions from electricity generation by as much as 78 percent without having to develop any new technologies or use costly batteries, a new study suggests. There’s a catch, though. The country would have to build a new national transmission network so that states could share energy.“Our idea was if we had a national ‘interstate highway for electrons’ we could move the power around as it was needed, and we could put the wind and solar plants in the very best places,” says study co-author Alexander MacDonald. Several years ago, MacDonald was curious about claims...

BISMARCK, N.D. - Gov. Jack Dalrymple on Monday ordered deep cuts to government agencies and a massive raid on state savings to make up for a more than $1 billion budget shortfall due to depressed crude prices and a drop in oil drilling. North Dakota had more than $2 billion in various reserve accounts just one year ago, but oil prices - a key contributor to the state's wealth - have taken a nosedive in the last year. The legislature's record-high $14.4 billion budget for the two years that began July 1 was built on oil prices and economic assumptions...

If energy powers the world, then whoever owns that energy must have power over the world. That’s certainly been the case for the last century or two. Ownership of our primary energy source, crude oil, is what made billionaires of John D. Rockefeller, H.L. Hunt, and assorted Middle Eastern kings, emirs, and sheikhs. Oil in the ground is wealth only on paper – you may own that oil, but it earns you nothing until you recover and sell it. Yet paper wealth is still wealth. It goes on your balance sheet as an asset that you can sell. You can...

The risk of a real estate bubble occurring in several regions of Switzerland reached its highest level at the end of 2015 since the late 1980s, according to a report from UBS. The bank on Thursday said its Swiss Real Estate Bubble Index reached 1.41 points in the fourth quarter of last year, up from 1.34 in the third quarter and the highest rate in around 15 years. The Lake Geneva and Greater Zurich areas remain the most exposed regions in the country with the highest risk potential for a residential real estate bubble. Other exposed cities include Zug, Lucerne,...

For more than seven years, Federal Reserve officials have touted their progress toward achieving "full employment," with the most recent target a 4.9 percent unemployment rate. With Friday's nonfarm payrolls report showing that the goal has been achieved, perhaps the Fed can raise the "Mission Accomplished" banner along with a welcome mat to the world of "full employment." The jobless rate last reached this level in February 2008, following a run from June 2005 to April 2008 during which unemployment never eclipsed 5 percent. Getting a "4-handle" on the number -- using Wall Street lingo -- was supposed to represent...

[snip]First, the Cruz plan would give America the lowest tax rates since the income tax was devised 100 years ago. For this reason, these plan are estimated by the Tax Foundation to grow the economy by a gigantic $2 trillion extra GDP per year after 10 years. That's exactly the opposite effect of the Hillary and Bernie show plans.Second, Cruz's plan eliminates almost all deductions and credits-which is how they get the rate so low. The IRS could be dramatically shrunk in size. Don't forget, when there are fewer deductions,there are fewer ways to cheat on your taxes. The lower...