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Calling it "the beginning of the end" of the nation's economic travails, President Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus spending bill into law Tuesday afternoon in Denver. Mr. Obama said he used 10 different pens to sign the bill -- essentially writing little more than one letter per pen. Pens used for major bills are keepsakes given to key aides and lawmakers involved in the process, and the high number of pens showed just how many people had a hand in delivering Mr. Obama's first major piece of legislation in his young administration. But passing the bill may have been...

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel posted this photo essay showing the HUGE lines of people being forced to wait outside in the rain for flu shots.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA next week begins the most extensive aerial survey of Earth's surface to chart the impact of global warming, with six years of flights over Antarctica to understand the frozen continent's glaciers and ice sheets. The US space agency said the massive aerial survey, part of a program dubbed Operation Ice Bridge, will get underway on October 15. ... Space officials said the plane, crew and scientists depart October 12 from NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, California, and fly to Punta Arenas, Chile, where they will be based through mid-November. Some 50 scientists and support...

Thousands of taxpayers from across the nation are planning to descend on Washington, D.C., to take their fight against excessive spending, bailouts, growth of big government and soaring deficits to the front door of the U.S. Capitol – and they say lawmakers can't hide from their loud and clear message. "The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties," the 9-12 Project website states. "We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the values and principles of the greatest nation ever created." On his show, Beck called Americans to forget...

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal. The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use...

PASADENA, CALIF. — The most massive black hole yet weighed lurks at the heart of the relatively nearby giant galaxy M87. The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun. The new measure suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest, and it could help astronomers solve a longstanding puzzle about galaxy development. "We did not expect it at all," said team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Cutting greenhouse gases by 70 percent this century would spare the planet the most traumatic effects of climate change, including the massive loss of Arctic sea ice, a study said Tuesday. Warming in the Arctic would be almost halved, helping preserve fisheries, as well as sea birds and Arctic mammals like polar bears in some regions, including the northern Bering Sea, according to scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). But the massive cuts of greenhouse gas emissions advocated by the researchers would only "stabilize the threat of climate change and avoid catastrophe," said NCAR...

PARIS (AFP) – A Jamaica-sized ice shelf is close to wrenching itself away from Antarctica, following dramatic weakening of an ice "bridge" linking it to the continent, the European Space Agency (ESA) reported Friday. The icy umbilical cord tying the Wilkins Ice Shelf to two islands on the Antarctic peninsula "looks set to collapse," ESA said. The evidence comes from radar pictures taken on Thursday by its Envisat Earth-monitoring satellite, the Paris-based agency said in a press release. Scientists have been keeping a worried eye on this ice shelf for years. For many, it is a barometer of global warming,...

WASHINGTON – Congress on Tuesday sent President Barack Obama a once-bipartisan bill to fund the domestic Cabinet agencies that evolved instead into a symbol of lawmakers' free-spending ways and penchant for back-home pet projects. The Senate approved the measure by voice after it cleared a key procedural hurdle by a 62-35 vote. Sixty votes were required to shut down debate. Obama is expected to sign the measure Wednesday to avoid a partial shutdown of the government. But the White House has kept the bill at arm's length, calling it last year's business. Obama is also set to announce steps aimed...

ZURICH (AFP) – Two of Switzerland's largest banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, are set to announce combined losses for 2008 of 29 billion Swiss francs later this week, the Sonntag newspaper reported Sunday. According to the report, UBS will announce an annual loss of 21 billion Swiss francs (14 billion euros, 18 billion dollars) on Tuesday, the largest in Swiss history and reflecting the fact the company was one of the banks hardest hit by the US subprime loan crisis. Last November, UBS posted a net profit of 296 million Swiss francs for the third quarter following a year of...

Long Beach, CA - Fasten your seat belts -- we're faster, heavier, and more likely to collide than we thought. Astronomers making high-precision measurements of the Milky Way say our Galaxy is rotating about 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously understood. That increase in speed, said Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, increases the Milky Way's mass by 50 percent, bringing it even with the Andromeda Galaxy. "No longer will we think of the Milky Way as the little sister of the Andromeda Galaxy in our Local Group family." The larger mass, in turn, means a greater...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A battle over the US government's financial rescue package heated up in Congress Tuesday, with top finance officials urging its swift passage and lawmakers digging in their heels. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, in their first testimony to Congress after the 700-billion-dollar bailout was proposed just days ago, argued that lawmakers should pass the emergency measure quickly or put the entire US economy at risk. Bernanke told lawmakers that despite unprecedented steps already taken by the Republican administration to confront the crisis, global financial markets "remain under extraordinary stress." --snip-- Paulson, echoing...

There has been a great deal published about how the "Evil Americans" have caused foreign markets to stumble. I suggest we look in a different direction

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26, 2007 – A concerned citizen led coalition forces to the largest cache of explosively formed penetrators ever found in a single location Oct. 23 in a home in Saada village, Iraq, officials reported. Soldiers from Troop B, 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, from Fort Lewis, Wash., and the 717th Ordnance Company explosive ordnance disposal team, 184th Ordnance Battalion, Combined Joint Task Force Troy, Fort Campbell, Ky., empty a massive weapons cache that was discovered at Saada village, Iraq, Oct. 23, 2007. The cache marks the largest discovery of explosively formed penetrators...

PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers have found the biggest stellar black hole so far, a monster with a mass 15.65 times that of our Sun, lurking in a nearby spiral-shaped galaxy. The find, located in a galaxy called Messier 33, has an even bigger companion -- a close-orbiting star that is 70 times the mass of the Sun, according to an investigation led by Jerome Orosz of San Diego University, California. Black holes are among the most powerful forces in the Universe. They are believed to be concentrated fields of gravity which are so powerful that nothing, not even light, can...

Massive Egyptian fort discovered Mon, 23 Jul 2007 Egypt announced on Sunday the discovery of the largest-ever military city from the Pharaonic period on the edge of the Sinai desert, part of a series of forts that stretched to the Gaza border. "The three forts are part of a string of 11 castles that made up the Horus military road that went from Suez all the way to the city of Rafah on the Egyptian-Palestinian border and dates to the 18th and 19th dynasties (1560-1081 BC)," antiquities supreme Zahi Hawwas said in a statement. Teams have been digging in the...

Super-eruption: no problem?Tools found before and after a massive eruption hint at a hardy population. Katharine Sanderson Massive eruptions make it tough for life living under the ash cloud. A stash of ancient tools in India hints that life carried on as usual for humans living in the fall-out of a massive volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago. Michael Petraglia, from the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues found the stone tools at a site called Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, above and below a thick layer of ash from the eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia —...

June 7, 2007 — The two heaviest stars ever have been discovered in the southern Milky Way galaxy. The double super heavyweights are actually in orbit around each other, and both break the record — 83 times the sun’s mass — for the most massive stars found to date. The heavier of the two weighs in at a whopping 114 "solar masses," while its little brother is 84 solar masses. The discovery was presented June 7 at the meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. The two big bruiser stars, which...

LOS ANGELES -- The state Mental Health Department agreed to pay a Los Angeles hotel $877 million in 2005 to hold a two-day training conference, according to state records. $877 million? For a two-day conference? It's wrong -- not even close. The actual contract was $36,200 and the agency spent only about $21,000, invoices show. Inclusion of the dramatically higher amount in a vast computerized index of state contracts was an honest mistake, the result of a worker typing a billing code where the contract's value should have been listed, officials say. An attempted fix created a duplicate listing, leading...

Boeing's Phantom Works is leading the effort to demonstrate the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). The three-phase technology demonstration builds on design studies that Boeing had conducted for the laboratory. Flight testing is envisaged around 2006. The 6 m [20 feet] long MOP features short-span wings and trellis-type tails. The 13,600 kg [30,000 lb] weapon contains a 2,700 kg [6,000 lb] explosive charge. MOP is designed to go deeper than any nuclear bunker buster and take out 25 percent of the underground and deeply buried targets. It is expected to penetrate as much as 60 meters [200 feet] through 5,000 psi...

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Wednesday revived some 20 tax breaks, extended trade benefits for developing countries and protected doctors from a big cut in Medicare payments by signing sweeping tax and trade legislation. The bill is a patchwork of must-do items that were left for the lame duck Congress. It was bundled together and passed by the House and Senate just before adjourning earlier this month. "This is a good piece of pro-growth legislation," said Bush, just before putting his signature to the legislation at a White House ceremony. Republican budget hawks bridled at the measure's approximately $40 billion...

Israel ready for massive invasion · Plan to push far inside Lebanon with thousands of troops· Deadlock within UN and EU Rory McCarthy in Metula, Ewen MacAskill and Clancy Chassay in Beirut Wednesday August 2, 2006 Israeli forces yesterday geared up for an expected major ground invasion of southern Lebanon, with troops in fierce clashes and artillery pounding targets across the area. The military called in air strikes despite a previous commitment to a "partial" halt in air bombardments. Israeli commanders said six brigades - several thousand soldiers - were now deployed inside Lebanon. At least 15,000 reserve troops, called...

Massive earthquake destroyed ancient city of Anamurium, say scientists Saturday, July 8, 2006 ANKARA - Turkish Daily News The ancient city of Anamurium, located west of Mersin's Anamur district, was destroyed by a massive earthquake in the sixth century, scientists working at the site announced on Wednesday. Professor Selim Ýnan of Mersin University said in a written statement that four fault lines in the triangle formed by the Mut, Ermenek and Anamur districts had been identified during studies conducted over the last two years with Professor Nurdan Ýnan. Ýnan said the research revealed strong evidence that the ancient city was...

ROME (Reuters) - An underwater volcano with a base larger than Washington D.C. has been discovered just off the shores of Sicily, a scientist with Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology said on Thursday. The volcanic structure, which incorporates peaks previously thought to be separate volcanoes, was named Empedocles after the Greek philosopher who named the four classic elements of earth, air, fire and water. Legend has it that the philosopher died by throwing himself into Mount Etna, the nearby Sicilian volcano. Giovanni Lanzafame, who works at the institute and led the research, said Empedocles was at least 400...

Massive mummy fraud discovered after 2,000 years Maev Kennedy Wednesday June 21, 2006 Not quite what it seems ... Roman period mummy at the Fitzwilliam Museum Modern medical science has exposed the villainy of the crocodile mummy sellers of Hawara, more than 2,000 years after they defied the edict of a Pharaoh and turned neatly bandaged bundles of rubbish into a nice little earner. Before the reopening this month of the Egyptian Galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, curators took their animal and human mummies to the city's Addenbrooke's Hospital, as part of a £1.5m re-display of the internationally...

Trailing in the polls and facing friction inside his own Republican Party, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set a fundraising goal of more than $120 million for the November election. The sum rivals the amount raised and spent by the entire field of candidates in the 2002 governor's race. If Schwarzenegger succeeds, the money raised — along with tens of millions of dollars that Democrats are likely to spend — would shatter state and national campaign finance records. --snip-- Asked if the governor's ambitious fundraising goal this year might not fuel further attacks, Stutzman replied: "Whether you like it or not,...

SAN DIEGO – A pedophile who was part of the international child pornography ring that exchanged videos and photos of themselves molesting children was sentenced Thursday to more than 467 years to life in state prison. Paul Whitmore, a former counselor for autistic children, was convicted Nov. 30 of 51 felony charges, including committing a lewd act on a child, aggravated sexual assault on a child, posing a minor for pictures involving sexual conduct for commercial purposes and attempting to dissuade a witness from reporting a crime. The verdicts included special allegations of bondage, sodomy, sexual penetration, oral copulation and...

At Sundance Film Festival... Many celebrities keep their kids out of the public eye to avoid the paparazzi and kidnappers. Not Rosie O'Donnell. O'Donnell said it was Madonna — her co-star in "A League of Their Own" — who explained to her why she appeared with her daughter Lourdes in public. Rosie, wife Kelli Carpenter O'Donnell and their two sons and two daughters will be on hand Tuesday for the world premiere of the documentary "All Aboard! Rosie's Family Cruise" at the Sundance Film Festival. Kelli, whom Rosie married in San Francisco in 2004, and Parker, 10; Chelsea, 8; Blake,...

Despite a population boom forecast for California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hopes to keep traffic gridlock from worsening - and even improve it from today's levels - with his $107 billion transportation plan, officials said Friday. The governor's ambitious proposal for highways and freight-moving projects - which would be funded, in part, by voter-approved bonds - is unprecedented in a region where commuters spend 93 hours a year idling in traffic. It would add 750 highway miles, 550 miles of car-pool lanes and 600 miles of commuter rail. "We think we can make a significant improvement over today's levels for the...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Attempting to rekindle his image as a bipartisan populist, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday urged cooperation among lawmakers and proposed a sweeping $222 billion public works program that would require the largest bond package in state history. The governor's annual State of the State speech addressed issues basic to the lives of most Californians, including more funding for public schools, rebuilding freeways and transit systems, improving air quality and raising the minimum wage. He asked Californians to move beyond a year filled with acrimony over the special election he had called and devoid of significant political accomplishment....

Word has it that Gov. Schwarzenegger is seriously considering a $100-billion infrastructure bond, causing many to ask, “Can we afford this?” The answer is an emphatic no, even though California’s fiscal picture is slightly better than it has been in recent years. That can be attributed to a generally healthy economy funneling billions into state coffers. Structurally, however, California remains in poor condition as the state continues to pay for past mistakes such as spending sprees during the Davis era. This locked California into obligations that were only sustainable with the tremendous tax-revenue growth of the late 1990s. Predictably, the...

That ominous shadow that is now darkening the Golden State is being cast from a massive "infrastructure" bond trial balloon. Although an exact amount has not been announced, the Capitol is abuzz with numbers that would make Bill Gates blush. Insiders from both the Schwarzenegger administration and the Democrat controlled legislature have suggested that a "megabond" of $50 billion, or even $100 billion, is possible. Backers of this monstrous debt issuance claim that the proceeds would be used to rebuild California's infrastructure of roads, levies, dams and other critical "brick and mortar" needs which no one disputes have been horribly...

SACRAMENTO — Coming off a losing campaign to curb state spending, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is promoting a statewide public works program that may be financed by a bond sale so large it would dwarf previous state borrowings. The governor hopes to join with Democratic leaders and businesses to address Californians' growing frustration with clogged roadways, polluted water, hospital shortages, overcrowded schools ... Schwarzenegger is seizing an issue with wide bipartisan support in an effort to restore his image as a moderate, although his plan threatens to cause tension with some conservative allies who have long warned against more government borrowing....

One financial expert describes it as one of the most stunning transfers of wealth in human history, from the pockets of taxpayers to the pockets of government employees. What will it take to awaken the victims? What's happening is that extravagant increases in pensions and other compensation of state and local government employees threaten to cause a wave of bankruptcies, tax increases and cutbacks in services. An analysis by the L.A. Daily News this week showed that California's largest public agencies face an increase of $108 billion in pension costs compared to just three years ago. According to the Legislative...

WASHINGTON - Organizers are planning what they say will be the largest anti-war demonstration in the nation's capital since the Iraq war began in March 2003. The ANSWER Coalition and United for Peace and Justice detailed their plans Thursday for the Sept. 24 protest. They plan to bus in people from across the country for a march past the White House. Other major protests are planned that day in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Cindy Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, was killed last year in Iraq, is on a 25-state bus tour that will end at the...

A massive grave site thousands of years old was discovered at the Monastery of St. Barnabas in the occupied areas of Cyprus Turkish Cypriot daily CYPRUS TIMES newspaper (24.07.05) reports that a major archaeological discovery was made recently at the Monastery of St. Barnabas, after the wheel of a tourist bus disappeared into a hole revealing an underground chamber. The so-called authorities of the Antiquities and Museums Department at occupied Famagusta, headed by Mr Hasan Tekel, were informed and a subsequent investigation, in the form of a dig has uncovered a massive grave site thousands of years old covering Classical,...

OAK BLUFFS, Mass. -- It wasn't too little, but it was too late. Fishermen who hauled in a massive 1,100 pound tiger shark off Massachusetts this past weekend failed to capture first place in the monster shark derby on Martha's Vineyard. The reason: The boat was six minutes too late in returning to Oak Bluffs harbor with its catch. The toothy tiger shark may not have won the competition, but it did win the admiration of other fishermen. Steven James of the Boston Big Game Fishing Club said this truly was a monster shark, and one that "could eat you."

Rosen goes to trial May 3 on charges of falsely underreporting the costs of the August 2000 gala — thus inflating the amount of campaign cash ostensibly raised for Clinton at the event.

EVANSVILLE, Ind. - Frigid temperatures, blasting wind and more snow than some places normally see in a year left parts of the Midwest and South paralyzed Thursday, and transformed a section of highway in southern Indiana into a parking lot. The winter storm dumped double-digits of snow from Ohio to Wyoming, the Texas Panhandle to the Great Lakes, disrupting pre-Christmas travel. Motorists in parts of Mississippi and Tennessee were warned Thursday to stay off highways iced up from freezing rain. Hundreds of thousands lost power in Ohio. Southern Indiana barely had time to catch its frosty breath after a snowstorm...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

"I think it's very important for our friends, the Israelis, to have a peaceful Palestinian state living on their border. And it's very important for the Palestinian people to have a peaceful, hopeful future." So spoke President Bush just two days after his re-election, just exactly as news reports were leaking Yasser Arafat's demise.The combination of Mr. Bush's stunning new mandate and Mr. Arafat's near-death condition will lead, I predict, to a quick revival of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy after months of relative doldrums and to massive dangers to Israel.The doldrums will cease because the Bush administration views Mr. Arafat as the...

-snip- RUSH: Kerry's going to get us out. Look it, you know, the real question we're going to face -- I don't care who the president is -- this war on terror, folks, and I think... Well, I do care who. That's not the right way to put it, because it does matter who the president is........ But at some point, dealing with these people is going to require taking steps that the American people are going to have to be prepared for, and they're not going to be easy steps. They're going to be brutal. I'm talking about we...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Tens of thousands of Florida voters may be illegally registered to vote in two states, and more than 1,600 may have cast ballots in Florida and one of two other states in recent elections, a newspaper reported Friday. Elections officials said they have few ways to prevent someone from registering in two states at once, and a lack of safeguards makes it easy for people to vote illegally, the Orlando Sentinel reported in a story for Friday's editions. The Sentinel examination of voting records from Florida, Georgia and North Carolina found more than 68,000 cases in which...

Major website blackout blamed on massive attack 17:13 16 June 04 NewScientist.com news service Some of the world's most popular internet sites suffered blackouts on Tuesday following a co-ordinated and distributed online attack. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and several other major sites faltered as a result of the attack, which started at 10:45 EST on Tuesday and lasted for over two hours. The problems were traced to Akamai, in Massachusetts, US, which provides support to the internet giants though a vast network of distributed servers for all of the sites. Technical experts said the incident was consistent with an attack on...

Newswise — “Suppose you have a nanofactory that can make almost anything you want, in almost any quantity, at very low cost. Do you live happily ever after?...One nasty neighbor could ruin everyone's day. A country that designed and built lots of cutting-edge weapons potentially could take over the world. That possibility could easily lead to an arms race—one a lot less stable than the nuclear arms race, because weapons development would be much cheaper, faster, and easier to hide. Criminals could send smart bugs to spy on you or make your life miserable unless you paid protection money. Wastrels...

LIVERMORE, Calif. - A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist, in collaboration with international researchers, has found evidence for the synchronous formation of massive, luminous elliptical galaxies in young galaxy clusters. The forming galaxies were detected at sub-millimeter wavelengths. Emission at these wavelengths is due to dust from young stars that is heated by the stars or by active black holes. The galaxies were grouped around high-red shift radio galaxies, the most massive systems known, suggesting that they all formed at approximately the same time. In the present universe, the most massive galaxies are elliptical galaxies, which are found in the...

US 'threatens' to drop massive bomb on Tikrit April 11 2003 at 10:13AM By Donald Macintyre The United States has stepped up the military and psychological pressure on Tikrit as the hunt for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his top aides began to focus on northern and western Iraq. In what looked like a calculated propaganda move as US-led forces continued to bomb Tikrit, the Pentagon issued a thinly veiled threat to deploy - for the first time in the war - its biggest non-nuclear bomb. The threat to use the 9 526kg bomb came amid speculation by US commanders...

<p>PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - Astronomers have completed the most thorough high-resolution digital survey of the heavens and released its 5 million images on the Internet.</p> <p>The map of the sky took four years of observations and $40 million to complete. It contains an estimated 500 million celestial objects, mostly stars but also galaxies, asteroids and comets.</p>

Massive airlift as dozens die in Nigeria fighting By Glenn Mackenzie in Warri, Nigeria 21 March 2003 Hundreds of women, children and the elderly were flown to safety yesterday from fighting in the oil-rich Niger Delta that killed scores of people and crippled multinational oil company operations. ChevronTexaco, Shell and the Nigerian National Petrol-eum Corporation used helicopters to evacuate peoplefrom remote oil facilities, where they had taken refuge from the fighting in the southern port city of Warri. At least eight villages and one oil facility have been destroyed in battles involving Nigerian soldiers and Ijaw and Itsekiri ethnic militants....

I realize the organizers of the "possibly 10 million anti-war protestors" are the usual suspects, er, socialists, but I wonder if FReepers keep tabs on any of the groups listed below? Thanks for your help. United for Peace & Justice is a new national campaign that brings together a broad range of organizations throughout the United States to help coordinate our work against a U.S. war on Iraq. At an initial meeting in Washington, DC on October 25, more than 70 peace and justice organizations agreed to form United for Peace & Justice and signed on to the following statement:...