WASHINGTON — New budget talks between top Congressional Republicans and President Obama made progress late Saturday, suddenly stirring optimism that a last-minute deal could be reached to avert a potential federal default that threatened significant economic and political consequences. After a tense day of Congressional floor fights and angry exchanges, Senator Harry Reid, the majority [...]
The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit corporation that makes the Firefox browser, released an experimental tool last week that could dramatically change the way people identify themselves online. Instead of handing your log-in credentials over to countless different websites, or to a site like Facebook or Google that then confirms your identity with other sites, Mozilla’s [...]
With the U.S. moving perilously closer to defaulting on its loans, the House on Tuesday evening passed an increase in the federal debt limit tied to progress on a balanced budget, but the Senate responded less than two hours later by putting the House bill on ice. The House bill was Speaker John Boehner’s third [...]
This is a speech by Herbert Hoover, the 31st American President, which explains why the federal government should stay away from commercial business: “Rugged Individualism” Speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden October 23, 1928 This campaign now draws near a close. The platforms of the two parties defining principles and offering solutions of various [...]
Washington – House Speaker John Boehner’s push to rally Republicans behind his deficit-reduction bill appeared to be having an effect Thursday as freshmen lawmakers fell in line behind the plan ahead of a series of critical votes. But with the vote expected to be very close, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats worked to [...]
CONTROVERSIAL when it began a generation ago, China’s one-child policy is stirring yet more contention. Until recently most discussion in China has been confined to academic demographers. Many of them argue that the policy did little good when it began and is increasingly damaging now that the fertility rate is below the replacement level and [...]
An international team of researchers has combined data from multiple sources to provide the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves. The work by researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Laboratoire d’Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, Centre National [...]
President Obama on Monday night urged a “balanced approach” in crafting a deal to raise the debt ceiling, saying a Republican proposal to temporarily extend the debt limit would hurt students, seniors and the middle class by forcing Draconian cuts on government spending. “That is no way to run the greatest country on Earth. It [...]
OSLO — The Norwegian man charged Saturday with a pair of attacks in Oslo that killed at least 92 people left behind a detailed manifesto outlining his preparations and calling for a Christian war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination, according to Norwegian and American officials familiar with the investigation. As stunned [...]
Membership in Google+, which was launched only about three weeks ago, is soaring. Calculations by Comscore indicate the service had 20 million visitors in just 21 days. Meanwhile, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is reported to be preparing to add a social gaming feature to the Google+ service in order to attract even more subscribers and pose [...]
ScienceDaily (July 22, 2011) — Water really is everywhere. Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar — one of the [...]
The Federal Reserve is actively preparing for the possibility that the United States could default as a deadline for raising the government’s $14.3 trillion borrowing limit looms, a top Fed policymaker said on Wednesday. Charles Plosser, president of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank, said the U.S. central bank has for the past few months been [...]
There seems to be some confusion in behalf of the U.S. Department of State concerning their interests. Not to mention, there’s an enormous contradiction between what exactly they are supposed to represent and especially when it comes to Cuba. on one had they state on their official Government Website: ……….Although many religious groups report that [...]
What does society do when one person’s behavior puts the greater community at risk? That’s a no-brainer, right? We make them stop. We pass laws, or impose economic rules, or find other way to discourage individual behaviors that threaten the greater common good. You don’t get to drive drunk. You don’t get to smoke in [...]
Regular Atlas readers recall the story I broke a couple of months ago on Facebook fascism: Facebook’s Fascism in Group Membership Elimination — well, they did it. Despite several media outlets picking up my story, Facebook gave its users the big middle finger, but I believe we need a presence on Facebook — so I [...]
Some soldiers serving in the Middle East who develop difficulty breathing — but whose chest X-rays show nothing out of the ordinary — have constrictive bronchiolitis, a kind of lung damage virtually unknown in young adults, a study shows. Reporting in the July 21 New England Journal of Medicine, physician Robert Miller of Vanderbilt University [...]
Apple has delighted its shareholders by racking up another record quarter, strengthened by strong sales of its iPhones, iPads and record sales of its Mac computers. It also hinted that the next version of the iPhone would be released in September, alluding to a “future product transition” then. The firm’s revenues were $28.57bn, up 90% [...]
The FBI was executing search warrants in California early Tuesday morning, following searches earlier in the day in New York, at residences believed to be associated with members of notorious hacking group Anonymous, FoxNews.com has learned. Sources said these searches, being carried out at 6 a.m. PDT, are connected to allegations that a national network [...]
It’s truly amazing that literally every day the Obama administration finds a new way to mess up the Middle East. July 14-15, 2011, is a new record since it damaged Western interests and any hope for a stable future in three countries almost simultaneously! I noted a few days ago that the Obama government finally [...]
WHEN the dismal news came on July 8th that the unemployment rate had risen fractionally to 9.2%, both Republicans and Democrats declared the data proof of the folly of the other party’s policies. How, Republicans asked, could Democrats even consider raising taxes when the economy is so weak? How, Democrats retorted, could Republicans advocate big [...]