Free Republic

First he was forced to quit his job as New York governor after spending a rumored $15,000 on hookers, then he lost his marriage after an affair with a spin doctor 23 years his junior was exposed. Now disgraced Democrat Eliot Spitzer, 56, is being investigated by police over claims that he choked a woman in a $1,000-a-night suite at the Plaza Hotel near New York's Central Park. According to police sources who spoke to the New York Post, Svetlana Travis called cops at 8pm on Saturday to say she was having a breakdown and had slashed her wrists. She...

How Low Can The Market Go? Henry Blodget | Mar. 2, 2009 /snip There were four massive stock bubbles in the 20th Century: 1901, 1929, 1966, and 2000. During each of these bubble peaks, the S&P 500 neared or exceeded 25X on professor Robert Shiller's cyclically adjusted P/E ratio.* After the first three of these peaks, the S&P 500 PE did not bottom until it hit 5X-8X. We're still in the middle of the last one. The most recent bubble peak, 2000, was by far the most extreme we have ever experienced. In 2000, the S&P 500 by prof. Shiller's...

LONDON (AP) -- Oil prices fell below $70 a barrel Tuesday as Tropical Storm Ernesto veered away from the oil and gas region of the Gulf of Mexico, easing concern that output would be disrupted. Light sweet crude for October delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell 85 cents to $69.76 a barrel in electronic trading by afternoon in Europe. It last traded below $70 on Aug. 18. The fall extended a $1.90 drop on Monday, when it settled at $70.61. October Brent crude at London's ICE Futures exchange dropped 86 cents to $69.96 a barrel. Royal Dutch Shell...

Britons go bust at rate of one per minute By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor (Filed: 05/08/2006) One person is falling victim to insolvency every minute of the working day and home repossession applications show the biggest rise since the early 1990s housing crash. Many are finding it impossible to pay record gas and electricity bills The Government figures issued yesterday, 24 hours after the Bank of England raised interest rates for the first time in two years, show that more and more families are being caught up in the ballooning debt crisis. Experts said that many families were finding it...

The Pope still alive

<p>Oregon wants to know more about where people are driving -- a lot more. And it's looking at some high-tech ideas to generate tax revenue by billing drivers for every mile they travel on the state's roads.</p> <p>The Oregon Department of Transportation is evaluating a scheme that uses the global positioning system to keep track of the distance every car travels in order to impose a road-use tax.</p>