Free Republic

If there was any doubt after the government shutdown and last protracted battle over the debt ceiling, this cave from Republicans should make it clear: The debt ceiling is no longer a legitimate political weapon. House Speaker John Boehner will bring a "clean" debt-ceiling increase to the floor on Tuesday night. For Republicans, it completes an epic swing in positions from 2011, when they first made the debt-ceiling increase a major vehicle to try to force spending cuts from President Barack Obama and Democrats. Consider the swing: In 2011, Boehner established the rule in his namesake — "the Boehner rule,"...

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has brought down the world's largest spam network, Rustock. Rustock, at its peak, was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft's wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%. Rustock was taken down, piece by piece, in a similar way to the Mega-D botnet. First the master controllers, the machines that send out commands to enslaved zombies, were identified. Microsoft quickly seized some of these machines located in the U.S. for further analysis,...

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan sought to allay U.S. concern about the freedom of notorious nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, insisting Saturday that his network which allegedly supplied Iran and North Korea with atomic technology has been probed and dismantled and cannot rise again. Khan, feted in Pakistan for his key role in making it a nuclear weapons state, emerged from five years of de facto house arrest on Friday after a court declared him a "free citizen" subject to a secret agreement with the government.

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!

A report released Tuesday said Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network has been largely dismantled, but the threat posed by extremist Muslim terrorists remains high and has grown harder to track. The report by the London-based Control Risks Group said the number of countries likely to pose a medium security risk to Western businesses operating in them was 71 for 2004, with 14 countries bumped up from low-risk. The group is a private consultancy that advises companies on security. Many of this year's medium risk countries were in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar. Among the other...