NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks skidded Monday afternoon, with the Dow's nearly 778-point drop being the worst single-day point loss ever, after the House rejected the government's $700 billion bank bailout plan.

Stocks tumbled ahead of the vote and the selling accelerated on fears that Congress would not be able come up with a fix for nearly frozen credit markets. The frozen markets mean banks are hoarding cash, making it difficult for businesses and individuals to get much-needed loans. (Full story)

According to preliminary tallies, the Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 777.68, surpassing the 684.81 loss on Sept. 17, 2001 - the first trading day after the September 11 attacks. However the 7% decline does not rank among the top 10 percentage declines.

The Standard & Poor's 500 (SPX) index was down 8.7% and the Nasdaq composite (COMP) 9.1%.

"The stock market was definitely taken by surprise," said Drew Kanaly, chairman and CEO of Kanaly Trust Company, referring to the House vote. "If you watched the news stream over the weekend, it seemed like it was a done deal. But the money is being held hostage to the political process."

Skypecasts unavailable

On Monday, 1st September 2008 we took the decision to retire Skypecasts from active service for the immediate future.

Skypecasts was one of the many features we developed to enable conversations across the world. What we learned by watching how the product was used and through feedback we received was that Skypecasts wasn’t quite measuring up to our high standards and expectations for connecting and delighting our Skype community.

To those people who regularly enjoyed hosting and taking part in Skypecasts, we apologize for the inconvenience. We hope we’ll be able to release a new and improved Skypecasts product in the not too distant future.

We continue to believe in the concept of Skypecasts – group communication on a specific topic of interest. As such, we will look for ways to reintroduce this functionality in a way that lives up to both our and our community’s high standards.

By Peter Parkes on August 26, 2008
()

At Skype, our aim is to offer products that delight people and enable the world's conversations. Part of our vision means coming up with new ways for our community of more than 338 million registered users to stay in touch.

Skypecasts is one of the many features that we've developed to enable these conversations. What we've learned by watching how the product is used and through user feedback is that Skypecasts is not quite measuring up to our high standards and expectations for connecting and delighting our users.

As a result, we have made the decision to retire Skypecasts from active service for the immediate future, effective 12 noon BST on Monday, 1st September 2008.

This decision is consistent with Skype's efforts to prioritise resources towards the products and areas of innovation that that will have the biggest impact on the Skype community.

Philosophically, we continue to believe in the concept of Skypecasts - group communication on a specific topic of interest. As such, we will look for ways to reintroduce this functionality in a way that lives up to both our and our community's high standards.

Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad's dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. "We'd been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me," LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own messes. He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. "You don't always know who the bad guys are," he says. "When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor — things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would."
So LeJeune visited a military doctor in Iraq, who, after a quick session, diagnosed depression. The doctor sent him back to war armed with the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons," LeJeune says. "If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills."

By popular demand, 'the Appliantologist is a KGB infiltrator for the Belarusian Government' will be the next 24 hour 7 day a week www.skypeassholes.com joint effort skypecast topic for the month of June.

ZERO has one central thesis - that the official version of events surrounding the attacks on 9/11 can not be true. This brand new feature documentary, featuring presentations from intellectual heavyweights, Gore Vidal and Nobel Prize Winner, Dario Fo, explores the latest scientific evidence and reveals dramatic new witness testimony, directly conflicting with the US Government's account. Dubbed "the bomb of the Rome Film Festival" in 2007, Zero is the first 9/11 film to bridge the mainstream gap. Decision makers are starting to sit up and listen to its message, including the European Parliament where the film screened in February 2008.

It is so transparent as to almost be a joke. One day after eleven men took the British government to the European Court of Human Rights, complaining they had been illegally held without charge as terrorism suspects, a mental patient, described as an Islamic convert, nearly blows himself up with a bomb in a restaurant in southwestern England. “Nicky Reilly, 22, was arrested and taken to a hospital after the small explosion in a branch of the family-orientated Giraffe restaurant chain in the center of the city of Exeter,” reports Reuters.

Republican Nominee John McCain will speak at the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza (The Race), the extreme Hispanic lobby group that advocates a militant "reconquista" of the Southwestern United States.

Citing the engagement with the group as “part of his commitment to talking with all Americans.”, McCain will attend the convention in San Diego July 14, according to a press release which also announced the launch of his own Spanish website.

McCain, favored by La Raza due to his previous calls for a total amnesty on illegal immigrants in the U.S. and sustained opposition to efforts to strengthen controls at the U.S.-Mexican border, will repeat the appearance he made at the 2004 National Council of La Raza in Phoenix, Arizona where he made a keynote address.

McCain has a long and fruitful relationship with the group. In 1999 La Raza honored the Senator at its tenth annual Capital Awards for "staunch support of the Hispanic community".

Daily Show
Monday, May 5, 2008
President Bush and cable news offer plenty of hyperbole but no solutions to the nation's money problems.

TRILATERAL COMMISSION EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Thomas S. Foley North American Chairman
Peter Sutherland European Chairman
Yotaro Kobayashi Pacific Asia Chairman
Allan E. Gotlieb North American Deputy Chairman
Herve De Carmoy European Deputy Chairman
Han Sung-Joo Pacific Asia Deputy Chairman
Lorenzo H. Zamibrano North American Deputy Chairman
Ainijrzej Olechowski European Deputy Chairman
Shijuro Ogata Pacific Asia Deputy Chairman
David Rockefeller Founder And Honorary Chairman
Paul A. Volcker North American Honorary Chairman
Georges Berthoin Chairman European Honorary
Otto Graf Lambsdorf European Honorary Chairman
Michael J. O’Neil North American Director
Paul Revay European Director
Tadashi Yamamoto Pacific Asia Director

NORTH AMERICAN GROUP

Madeleine K Albright The Albright Group LLC Washington, D.C.
Graham Allison Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Cambridge, Mass.
Richard L. Armitage Armitage International Washington, D.C.

“… it is of utmost importance that an equilibrium be established between the world’s total population and the capacity of ’spaceship earth’…” - RIO: Reshaping the International Order, 1976 (p124)

The establishment of a World Food Authority to control the food supply of the world is a major goal of The Club of Rome’s RIO report. This issue is intertwined with exaggerated fears of environmental collapse and the elite’s obsession with population control.

A 28-year CIA career man and a former skeptic of alternative 9/11 explanations has gone further than ever before in voicing his convictions that the attacks bore the hallmarks of an inside job and the three buildings in the WTC complex were brought down by controlled demolition.

Bill Christison is a former senior official of the CIA. He was a National Intelligence Officer and the Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis before his retirement in 1979. Since then he has written numerous articles on U.S. foreign policies.

In Christison's recent article, Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11, he afforded credibility to the notion that "significant parts" of the official 9/11 story were false and after careful research he concluded that the twin towers and building 7, "were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings."

DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey predicted she would be "suicided" on several occasions both recently and as far back as 17 years ago - comments that now appear ominous in light of the announcement that the former head of a Washington escort service allegedly killed herself today. "If taken into custody, my physical safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized," she wrote in August 1991 following an attempt to bring her to trial, "Rape, beating, maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me," said Palfrey in a handwritten letter to the judge accusing the San Diego police vice squad of having a vendetta against her. During several recent appearances on The Alex Jones Show, Palfrey also said that she was at risk of being killed and that authorities would make it look like suicide.

Former Helmut Schmidt cabinet member, 25-year German Parliamentarian and global intelligence expert Andreas Von Bülow says that the 9/11 attack was run by the highest levels of the US intelligence apparatus using WTC Building 7 as a command bunker which was later demolished in order to destroy the crime scene.

Speaking to a nationally syndicated radio host on the GCN Radio Network, Von Bülow said that "the official story is so wrong, it must be an inside job."

Von Bülow discussed the special software programs that allow the CIA to track suspicious stock market movements in real time. Record put options placed on United and American Airlines in the week before 9/11, a speculation that the stock would crash, clearly indicated inside foreknowledge of the impending attack.

AFP
April 30, 2008
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States Air Force had considered a plan to drop nuclear bombs on China during a confrontation over Taiwan in 1958 but it was overruled, declassified documents showed Wednesday.

When he learned about it, President Dwight Eisenhower instead required the Air Force to initially use conventional bombs against Chinese forces if the crisis escalated, according to previously secret US Air Force history.

The president's instructions seemingly astounded the Air Force top brass but the author of one of the studies released said US policymakers recognized that atomic strikes had "inherent disadvantages" because of the fall-out danger in the region as well as the risk of nuclear escalation.

Thaindian News
April 30, 2008
Tehran, April 30 (Xinhua) Iran has replaced the US dollar with other currencies in its oil transactions, an oil ministry official said Wednesday. “The dollar has completely been removed from our oil trade. Crude oil customers have agreed with us to use other currencies. Our future oil business will be in euro in Europe, yen in Asia,” he added.
In the wake of worsening relations with Washington in the past years over the nuclear disputes and the latest depreciation of the US dollar, Iran has vowed to scale down the use of the greenback in its foreign trade. The Iranian central bank has also reduced its dollar reserves.
During the last summit of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Saudi Arabia, Iran proposed that it was necessary to replace the US dollar with other major hard currencies in oil trading.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Former Italian President and the man who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, Francesco Cossiga, has gone public on 9/11, telling Italy's most respected newspaper that the attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad and that this was common knowledge amongst global intelligence agencies.
Cossiga was elected President of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide 1985 election to become President of the country in 1985.
Cossiga gained respect from opposition parties as one of a rare breed - an honest politician - and led the country for seven years until April 1992.

Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?

* History Suggests It

* Crash Inconsistencies Suggest It

* Many, Including Some Members of Congress, Believe It

by Michael C. Ruppert

Nov. 1, 2002, 15:00 PST (FTW) -- The air crash deaths of Sen. Paul Wellstone, his wife, daughter, three staff members and two pilots at approximately 10:25 a.m. on Oct. 25 in Eveleth, Minn. has given rise to the widespread belief -- shared by at least two members of the House of Representatives who spoke on condition of anonymity -- that the crash was a murder.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A female suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi security forces' checkpoint in eastern Baghdad on Sunday, killing three people, military officials said.

The bombing came as fighting in the capital's Sadr City neighborhood killed at least seven Shiite militants.

The suicide bomber detonated her taxi near Shaab stadium in a mostly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said.

An Iraqi soldier and a traffic police officer were among the fatalities. Fourteen others were wounded in the blast, the official said.

In western Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded Sunday morning, killing one Iraqi soldier and wounding six people, including soldiers and bystanders, the official said.

The soldiers were on foot patrol in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Mansour at the time of the blast.

Below is a transcript of testimony in the Japanese Parliament that was broadcast live nationwide on NHK television. The Member of Parliament talking about 911 is Yukihisa Fujita from the Democratic Party of Japan. After the testimony Mr. Fujita says he got lots of phone calls from other members of Parliament thanking him for having the bravery to bring up 911 in Parliament. He also got one death threat.

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney grills Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the Pentagon's missing trillions, DynCorp's slave trade, and the 9/11 wargames.
House Hearing on FY06 Dept. of Defense Budget, March 11, 2005.