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KANSAS CITY, Mo — American Airlines flight 1775 had to make an emergency landing at MCI this afternoon. The flight was headed from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. when an unruly passenger tried to cause chaos mid-flight. According to another passenger on the plane, Mouaz Moustafa, some aboard weren’t initially aware of what was going on. “A flight attendant comes to the middle of the plane where I am, yells to another flight attendant in the back to turn on the lights. At this time, the plane starts descending very rapidly, I think we reached 5,000 feet per minute,” Moustafa...

Perhaps it is one of the fruits of the “self-esteem” emphasis in our schools that so many people feel confident to voice strong convictions about things they know little or nothing about — or, worse yet, are misinformed about. One of the hardest things for anyone to be informed about is the value of someone else’s productivity. Yet there are cries from all directions that some people are being paid “too much” and others “too little.” Judging Worth Who can possibly be better informed about the value of what someone else produces than those who use the goods or services...

I’ll begin by stating for the record that I am not an expert on counter-terrorism, intelligence operations or national security, which makes me just like 99.9% of those speaking out on these topics today, including too many purely partisan politicians eager to politicize all of it in search of recently elusive political power. Let me also establish the fact that few in America are more concerned with the rate at which we are certainly losing our freedoms and liberties than I am. I write about it all the time. But the American people are now being told that the current...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 (UPI) -- Three major U.S. telephone companies cooperated with the National Security Agency's wiretapping program without court warrants, USA Today reports. Executives who asked not to be named told the newspaper AT&T, MCI and Sprint granted access to their systems without warrants or court orders, and acted on the basis of oral requests from senior government officials. [snip]

SBC and Verizon both win merger clearance By Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington Published: October 31 2005 23:16 | Last updated: October 31 2005 23:16 SBC and Verizon on Monday successfully concluded their campaigns to win regulatory clearance for their two multi-billion dollar telecommunications deals. The Federal Communications Commission approved both companies’ merger plans without onerous conditions. The FCC, which has for months been evenly split between two Democratic and two Republican commissioners because of a Republican vacancy at the agency, voted unanimously to approve SBC’s $16bn takeover or AT&T and Verizon’s $8.5bn takeover of MCI following a weekend of internal...

Former Worldcom Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers was handed a 25-year prison term for directing the biggest accounting fraud in corporate history, leaving thousands of investors empty-handed. Ebbers, who built a small Mississippi-based long distance company into a telecommunications powerhouse, was found guilty on March 15 on all charges — one count of conspiracy, one count of securities fraud and seven counts of false regulatory filings. But he could also be a charming and folksy CEO, who preferred cowboy boots to suits, opened shareholder meetings with a prayer, ate lunch in the cafeteria and ran a company that had become a...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Former WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers will pay $5 million and transfer nearly all his assets into a liquidation trust to settle civil charges related to the company's accounting fraud, the government said Thursday. Federal prosecutors said the trust, which would sell off Ebbers' assets, would be worth up to $40 million. As a result, prosecutors said they would not seek restitution when Ebbers is sentenced July 13. The settlement springs from a class-action suit brought by investors against former WorldCom executives and board members, plus investment banks that underwrote WorldCom securities and auditing firm Arthur Andersen....

JACKSON, Miss. - MCI Inc. will pay $100 million in cash to cover back taxes that its predecessor WorldCom Inc. owed Mississippi, state Attorney General Jim Hood announced Monday. The telecommunications company also will turn over its former headquarters building in downtown Jackson to the state as part of the settlement, Hood said. The building has not been appraised, he said. WorldCom collapsed in 2002 amid revelations of an $11 billion accounting fraud to inflate earnings and hide expenses. WorldCom, which got its start in Mississippi, was once headquartered in Jackson and later moved to nearby Clinton. MCI is now...

NEW YORK (AP) -- The three-month bidding war for long-distance provider MCI ended Monday as Qwest dropped out after MCI agreed to an $8.54 billion deal with Verizon and rejected a higher-priced offer from Qwest for the fourth time. The price tag for MCI Inc. ended up about 25 percent higher than what Verizon Communications Inc. originally agreed to pay to acquire the phone company formerly known as WorldCom. But it is still 13 percent less than the $9.85 billion offered by Qwest Communications International Inc. in what became the biggest telecom bidding war since 1999 -- when Denver-based...

Qwest surrenders in war for MCI By Bruce Meyerson The Associated Press Post file / Brian Brainerd The logos of Qwest and MCI appear on buildings in downtown Denver in this 2005 file photo. New York - Denver-based Qwest dropped out of the bidding war for MCI Inc. today after MCI agreed to another new deal with Verizon, rejecting a higher-priced bid from Qwest for the fourth time. "It is no longer in the best interests of shareowners, customers and employees to continue in a process that seems to be permanently skewed against Qwest," the company said in a statement....

NEW YORK (AP) -- MCI embraced a $9.75 billion takeover bid from Qwest on Saturday, finally succumbing to pressure to scrap its lower-priced deal with Verizon. Verizon Communications Inc. now has five business days to respond with an improved proposal or possibly walk away the loser after a nearly three-month bidding war. MCI Inc. said its board of directors, after shunning three prior bids from Qwest Communications Inc., had determined that the latest offer was superior to the long-distance phone company's $7.5 billion agreement with Verizon. Verizon's options include boosting its offer a second time or walking away with...

Verizon is threatening to abandon its $7.5 billion buyout deal for MCI Inc. rather than pay more should the long-distance telephone company declare a rival $8.9 billion offer from Qwest as superior. Verizon's announcement came one day before a deadline set by Qwest Communications International Inc. for MCI to accept or reject its bid. In a statement Monday, Verizon Communications Inc. said, "If the MCI board, capitulating to Qwest's artificial deadline, declares this bid to be `superior,' it would seem to us that the decision-making process is being driven by the interests of short-term investors rather than the company's long-term...

Qwest may spark MCI bidding war The buyer of MCI would get a phone network with global reach US phone company Qwest has said it will table a new offer for MCI after losing out to larger rival Verizon, setting the scene for a possible bidding war.MCI accepted a $6.75bn (£3.6bn) buyout from telecoms giant Verizon on Monday, rejecting a higher offer from Qwest. Qwest chairman Richard Notebaert sent a letter to MCI's board on Thursday saying that it plans to submit a new offer after examining Verizon's bid. Formerly known as Worldcom, MCI is a long-distance and corporate...

The fighting entrepreneurial spirit was a hallmark of the man who helped found MCI -- William G. McGowan. McGowan, a financier who was brought in to save the nearly bankrupt MCI Communications Corp., in 1968 was a scrappy fighter determined to take on the giant AT&T, which at that time had monopoly control over all telephone service in the United States. Early in his bid to offer long-distance service, McGowan concluded that the company needed to be in Washington, where it could monitor its battles in the courts and Congress and before the Federal Communications Commission. Until then, the only...

The boards of Verizon Communications Inc. and MCI Inc. last night approved the acquisition of the nation's No. 2 long-distance carrier for about $6.8 billion in cash, shares and dividends, according to people familiar with the situation. The companies planned to announce the acquisition this morning, these people said, and MCI Chief Executive Michael Capellas called his counterpart at Verizon, Ivan Seidenberg, to congratulate him last night, according to these people. Amid a flurry of telecom deals, the fight over MCI has been intense because the No. 2 U.S. long-distance company, with 14 million residential and more than a million...

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Telephone company MCI Inc. (Nasdaq:MCIP - news) has received a $6 billion takeover bid from Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE:Q - news) and has held talks with another potential suitor, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ - news), sources familiar with the situation said on Thursday. Although MCI has been looking for a buyer for months, interest in the company intensified after long-distance rival AT&T Corp. (NYSE:T - news) last week agreed to be acquired by SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC - news) for $16 billion, the sources said. Long-distance companies have been slammed by eroding long-distance revenue, price wars...

<p>An SBC board member is also one of the largest investors in rival MCI -- a situation that Wall Street analysts and experts in business ethics say represents a clear conflict of interest.</p> <p>Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, 64, the richest man in Latin America and a major telecom investor, has sat on SBC's board since 1993. He served until last month as chairman of Telmex, Mexico's largest phone company, in which SBC holds an 8 percent stake.</p>

The networking company is investigating whether a security breach has led to some of its source code appearing on the Internet. An unspecified amount of the proprietary source code that drives Cisco Systems' networking hardware has appeared on the Internet, the technology giant acknowledged early on Monday. While the company was investigating whether a breach had lead to the leak, a representative could not confirm whether that network intruders had made off with the software equivalent of the crown jewels: some 800 megabytes of the networking giant's source code. "Cisco is aware that a potential compromise of its proprietary information...

<p>McLEAN, Va. (AP) — Bankrupt telecommunications company MCI said Friday it will cut 4,000 jobs — more than 7% of its workforce — and closing three call centers because of cost-cutting pressures and fallout from the national "do not call" registry. The company had announced in January that it was expecting to reduce overall costs by 15% to 20%, but did not mention specifically that jobs would be cut.</p>

McLEAN, Va. - Bankrupt telecommunications company MCI said Friday it is cutting 4,000 jobs — more than 7 percent of its work force — and closing three call centers because of cost-cutting pressures and fallout from the national Do Not Call registry. The company had announced in January that it was expecting to reduce overall costs by 15 percent to 20 percent, but did not mention specifically that jobs would be cut. The centers being closed are located in Denver, Phoenix and Niles, Ohio. Jobs are also being reduced at MCI facilities in Alpharetta, Ga., Colorado Springs, Colo. and Springfield,...