Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents. "Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job. Bowing to aggressive lobbying -- along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK -- regulators delayed...

CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says he disagrees with a Supreme Court decision striking down the death penalty for child rapists, telling reporters Wednesday that states should be able to execute people for “heinous” crimes.

As the cost of shipping continues to soar along with fuel prices, homegrown manufacturing jobs are making a comeback after decades of decline. While it once cost $3,000 to ship a container from a city like Shanghai to New York, it now costs $8,000, prompting some businesses to look closer to home for manufacturing needs. Some large companies like Crown Battery are cutting expenses by moving jobs from Mexico to Ohio. And hair care company Farouk Systems plans to shift all of its production from China to Houston this summer  bringing with it 1,000 jobs.

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - Memo to disappointed women supporters of Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton: Republican John McCain wants your vote. McCain, the senator from Arizona who has wrapped up his party's White House nomination, moved on Wednesday to woo women and other Clinton backers whose disappointment over her defeat by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama could cause them to switch teams. "I would welcome any of Senator Clinton's supporters' vote," McCain told reporters in Louisiana, adding he would seek backing from people across the political spectrum.

HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) -- Passing notes in study hall or getting your best friend to ask a boy if he likes you or, you know, LIKES you, is so last century. Nowadays, teenagers are snapping naked pictures of themselves on their cell phones and sending them to their boyfriends and girlfriends. Many of these pictures are falling into the wrong hands -- or worse, everyone's hands, via the Internet -- and leading to criminal charges. School administrators in Santa Fe, Texas, confiscated dozens of cell phones from students in May after nude photos of two junior high girls began circulating....

NEW YORK (AP) — You're used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance? Time Warner Cable Inc. customers — and, later, others — may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful. On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press....

A New York state judge on Tuesday found that Dell offered consumers no-interest financing for computers as part of an illegal scheme to lure them into high-interest loans. State Supreme Court Justice Joseph C. Teresi decided that Dell and Dell Financial Services engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices, said the N.Y. State Attorney General's Office, which filed the lawsuit in May 2007. DFS is a joint venture between Dell and CIT Bank. In his ruling, Teresi barred Dell and DFS from engaging in illegal business practices cited in the suit. The court will...

PORT ST. LUCIE - Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son's kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class. After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said. By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex -- who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism -- out of the class. Melissa Barton filed a complaint with Morningside's school resource officer, who investigated the matter, Port St....

Syracuse N.Y. - Three Syracuse University students and one former student have been charged in an armed robbery in a South Campus apartment early Saturday morning. Odion Akhuemokhan, 19, and Akhere Akhuemokhan,19, both of 310 Small Road; Michael Uko, 18, of 401 Euclid Ave., and Brian Reyes, 19, of New York City, were all charged Sunday evening, according to a Syracuse police report. They all face charges of first-degree robbery, first-degree burglary, first-degree criminal use of a firearm, all felonies, and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, a misdemeanor. They are accused in a robbery at 12:25 a.m. Saturday at...

An historic name in software will effectively pass into history in February as AOL discontinues development and active support for the Netscape browser, according to an official blog. AOL will keep delivering security patches for the current version of Netscape until Feb. 1, 2008, after which it will no longer provide active support for any version of the software, according to a Friday entry on The Netscape Blog by Tom Drapeau, lead developer for Netscape.com. The Netscape.com Web site will remain as a general-purpose portal. Netscape was the original mass-market Web browser and helped to popularize the Internet in the...

Excited and whimsical speculation about future versions of Windows is a popular pastime, almost as much as complaining that newly-released versions are too different from the "old reliable" releases that everybody knows and (sometimes) loves. With Windows Vista recently celebrating its first birthday and preparing for the release of Service Pack 1, a team of developers at Microsoft is already busy working on its successor. While Microsoft has been pretty good about keeping the details of "Windows 7" under wraps, a few enthusiastic employees have leaked out a few details. As is usually the case in these situations, people have...

A coalition of entertainment and publishing industry heavyweights would like to see the 2008 presidential candidates champion "meaningful copyright protection" in their policy platforms. The requests came Tuesday in the form of a letter (PDF) and a questionnaire (PDF), dispatched by the Washington-based Copyright Alliance to 17 candidates vying for Democratic or Republican nominations next year. The group has requested responses to its questionnaire by early January of next year and plans to make the answers public. In a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, Ross said the group also intends to hold briefings with presidential campaigns about its copyright...

MANLIUS, N.Y. (AP) - Six students at suburban Syracuse high school and two graduates are accused of hacking into the school's computer system and changing their grades and test scores. Authorities say 6 of the teenagers involved are current students at the school. Of the other two suspects, one attends Syracuse University and the other is a student at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. They're accused of breaking into the school's computers to change their scores on Advance Placement exams, SAT tests and classroom examinations.

Bumped from its slated June launch date thanks to the frantic scramble to finish the iPhone, the latest version of Mac OS X is finally ready for its close-up. Apple announced today that "Leopard" will bound into stores next Friday, complete with a revamped desktop, a new backup feature, and more ways to inspect your file folders. The Apple Store is already taking preorders for Mac OS X v10.5, which will go on sale at 6 p.m. on October 26. Expect to shell out $130 for a single-user license, or $200 for a five-user family pack. Also keep in mind...

LINUX runs the Google servers that manage billions of searches each day. It also runs the TiVo digital video recorder, the Motorola Razr cellphone and countless other electronic devices. But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.” That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price:...

Bowing to pressure from customers and computer makers, Microsoft plans to keep Windows XP around a little longer. Large PC manufacturers were slated to have to stop selling XP after January 31. However, they have successfully lobbied Microsoft to allow them to continue selling PCs with all flavors of Windows XP preloaded until June 30, a further five months. Microsoft also plans to keep XP on retail shelves longer and will allow computer makers in emerging markets to build machines with Windows XP Starter Edition until June 2010. The move indicates the continued demand for the older operating system, some...

September 11, 2007 Running the numbers on Vista Ina Fried, for News.com Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista continue to significantly trail those of Windows XP during its early days, according to a soon-to-be-released report. Standalone unit sales of Vista at U.S. retail stores were down 59.7 percent compared with Windows XP, during each product's first six months on store shelves, according to NPD Group. In terms of revenue, sales are also down, but the drop has been less steep, at 41.5 percent. The findings largely mirror the sales pattern NPD saw for Vista during its first week on...

MOUNT KISCO, N.Y., Sept. 6 — A village police officer was charged on Thursday with second-degree manslaughter in the death of a homeless Guatemalan immigrant four months ago that had shaken this community of 10,000 people. The officer, George Bubaris, also faces one count of unlawful imprisonment and two counts of official misconduct, according to an indictment unsealed in Westchester County. In a news conference on Thursday, the Westchester district attorney, Janet DiFiore, refused to detail what investigators believe transpired between Officer Bubaris and Mr. Perez, other than to say that Officer Bubaris, “while on duty as a Mount Kisco...

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands - It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. ADVERTISEMENT An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday — and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads. The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format. The CD still accounts...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is making waves with a planned amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act being introduced in time for the next school year. Reid's amendment holds select educational funds hostage for US colleges and universities that do not meet a set of criteria meant to bolster the war on file-sharing on college campuses. This is the legislative carrot-and-stick move that many colleges have feared would arise. The amendment would essentially put US colleges in the business of aggressively policing copyright on their network in order to stay off of a "blacklist" that would be comprised...