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Filed under: Classics, Coupe, Performance, Mercedes-Benz, South America

With the increasingly well-publicized progression of drug wars, ransomings, robberies and, well, murders in Mexico, I thought it sensible to familiarize myself with the various government tourist advisory messages ahead of a trip retracing part of the route of La Carrera Panamericana, the famed Mexican road race that ran from 1950 to 1955. Regarded by many as the toughest and most dangerous race ever to take place, the perils of our run down memory lane were likely to be rather different than what was encountered in the ’50s. Here are some excerpts of what we were told to expect:

o. “Toll (cuota) highways should be used whenever possible, rather than less secure free (libre) roads, where armed robberies and carjacking are more frequent.”
o. “Large fire fights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico.”
o. “U.S. citizen visitors are encouraged to stay in the well-known tourist areas.”
o. “Mexican styles of driving and road safety standards are very different from those in North America. Police do not regularly patrol the highways. Be prepared for vehicles that fail to observe speed limits or indicate lane changes, and that do not stop at red lights.”
o. “Thefts occur regularly. You should dress down, avoid wearing or carrying expensive jewelry, and carry only small amounts of cash… try to blend in.”
o. “Be careful accepting food, drinks, invitations or rides from strangers or recent acquaintances.”
o. “Road conditions vary and can be poor in some areas. Dangerous curves, poorly marked signs and construction sites, roaming livestock, slow-moving or abandoned vehicles, and other obstacles pose hazards.”
o. “You are also strongly advised against borrowing a vehicle… drivers are legally responsible for their vehicle’s contents, as well as for the legal status of passengers and the items carried by passengers.”

Thankfully for you, dear reader, we aren’t terribly proficient at heeding warnings, so a Mercedes-Benz invitation to borrow their spanking new (and clearly utterly inconspicuous) gullwing SLS AMG supercar and drive it through Mexico at a high rate of speed seemed downright reasonable and prudent. It also appeared to be an absurd amount of fun. Follow the jump to find out how it all shook out.

Photos by Mercedes-Benz | Chris Paukert / Copyright (C)2010 Weblogs, Inc.

Continue reading AB Road Trip: Crossing Mexico on the trail of La Carrera Panamericana in a Mercedes SLS AMG

AB Road Trip: Crossing Mexico on the trail of La Carrera Panamericana in a Mercedes SLS AMG originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Media companies looking for signs that the Apple iPad will be their iSavior aren’t likely to get much comfort from the early numbers on media app downloads. Early indications are that users want to read newspapers and magazines on their shiny new devices, but they seem to prefer free apps to paid ones. There is one notable exception, however — namely, the Time magazine issue that features a story on Steve Jobs and the iPad. That issue, which sells for $4.99, is currently the No. 1 top-selling app in the news category (the Wall Street Journal app is also difficult to categorize, since it’s a free download but users still pay to read articles).

That said, it seems likely that these results are just the tip of the iceberg as far as media apps on the iPad are concerned, and that a growing numbers of users will likely discover that they can get what they want either through free apps or via the iPad’s web browser.

The biggest issue confronting media companies is that their iPad apps in many cases simply replicate the design and features available on their free web sites, but they’re expecting users to pay as much as $17.99 a month for the privilege of reading that content on an iPad (in the case of the Wall Street Journal). This disconnect has drawn criticism from many observers, including venture investor Paul Kedrosky, who said that:

Paying $17.29/mo for WSJ iPad app should disqualify you for something important, like being allowed to use money.

Kevin Anderson, former blog editor at The Guardian, said that iPad app pricing is “a last act of insanity by delusional content companies.” And the sense that media apps are trying to wall off their content from the broader Internet is also likely to be disconcerting to some, says Josh Benton of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. Meanwhile, some newspaper and magazine companies are still reluctant to embrace the iPad because they are afraid of ceding too much control — and giving up too much revenue — to Apple, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Publishers are worried that paying Apple 30 percent of their sales from the device will eat into their revenues too much, and are also concerned that the computer company will wind up controlling access to the subscriber data that comes from the iPad. Several major media companies — including News Corp. and the four largest magazine publishers — are apparently trying to create their own digital storefront for content because they don’t want Apple to control access to their publications through its own iTunes media store.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
More iPad Content from GigaOM Pro

Nearly a full half-hour into the darkness this morning and we were beginning to wonder if it was time to break out the hurricane candles and board games – the world seemed to suddenly slow down and it had, dramatically. Twitter, you see, died on us this morning.

While we’re used to seeing the intermittent Fail Whale, the outage this morning lasted a solid 24 minutes according to the company, affecting both the website and API.

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In reality, the outage is not something new or even all that rare for the microblogging service, but normally we expect it to happen around highly trafficked Internet events, such as the iPad launch this weekend. But this outage, smack dab in the middle of the Monday morning news cycle, caught us completely off guard and we found ourselves wondering – where do you go when Twitter goes down?

Now, we don’t mean to be making a mountain out of a molehill here, and this certainly wasn’t like the four hour outage of last October, but it reminded us of our reliance on Twitter as a primary source of real-time communication, information and interaction.

Part of the problem we found this morning was that, especially when the API goes down too, our redundancy fails. We rely, in many ways, on our Twitter contacts list for our professional interactions and immediate, real-time communications. Normally, the website goes down but our trusty third-party clients keep on working. And many of the other sites we use simply pipe in our Twitter stream, joining it with other streams.

How can you ask the masses where to go and what to do when your megaphone is suddenly silenced? The extent to which Twitter has become the go-to source for real-time updates and mass responses suddenly became all too apparent.

Facebook we use more as a personal social network, Myspace was long ago abandoned and FriendFeed, what used to be the old standby when Twitter went down, remained a virtual ghost town during the outage this morning. Can Google Buzz pick up the slack when Twitter keels over? Or can we flip on over to Identi.ca to keep in touch? What sort of redundancy do you have built in to your social networks?

So, we had to wonder – where do you go when the Twitter lights go out? Or do you just hunker down and enjoy the silence for that sweet 24 minutes, like you might use a dusting of snow as an excuse to not drive to work that day?

As for the outage, there has been no word from the company on the cause, either on its blog or Twitter account and our emails received no response. We’ll just have to chalk it up to an overflow of iPad gushing in the meantime.

Update: Twitter says that it doesn’t know the exact cause of the issue yet, but says that it was an internal issue.

Discuss

Economic realities like the widening wealth gap and growing income inequality aren’t terribly popular topics on Capitol Hill, where most lawmakers still prefer to spout claims that merit and hard work – not family wealth and connections — are the surest dictators of success in this country. But don’t tell that to Rep. David Obey. The Wisconsin Democrat, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, shot out a statement this afternoon that points to the growing income divide as the driving force behind the voter discontent that’s threatening to unseat incumbents from both parties this November.

“Income for the middle fifth of American families rose only 15 percent from 1979 to 2006, and most of that growth came about because women are working much longer hours each year than three decades ago,” the statement says. “In contrast, those with incomes in the top ten percent saw their income grow 133%. Those in the top ten percent now receive half of all income in America.”

It gets more pointed.

Those even higher on the income ladder have had mindboggling income gains. In 2007, the average income of the top one hundredth of one percent reached $35 million, up almost ten-fold over the last three decades.  Meanwhile the rest of society was getting table scraps.

Obey goes on to outline the specific policy areas that have allowed that gap to grow, blaming “bad trade deals, unfair tax policy, toothless oversight of the loose financial activities of large corporations, and a systematic disinvestment in energy, science, education and other investment crucial to long term economic growth that benefits all Americans.”

“In the midst of all of that,” Obey adds, “why shouldn’t middle income taxpayers be angry?”

It’s a question worth asking this tax season, as most Americans are paying a higher income tax rate than the billionaire hedge fund managers of Wall Street.

Looking to expand your breakfast repertoire? These are some of our favorite breakfast cookbooks, with a little something for everyone, whether you wish to master the basics, indulge in comfort food favorites, or be inspired by fresh new ideas.

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New data released from the National Venture Capital Association shows further evidence of a rebounding acquisitions and IPO market for venture-backed companies in the first quarter of 2010. We mentioned back in January about the slight uptake in activity in the final quarter of 2009, and it seems that trend has continued upward into the new year with record breaking M&A numbers and rebounding IPO data.

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In the first quarter of 2010, Thompson Reuters and the NVCA tracked a record of 111 M&A deals for venture-backed companies, an all-time quarterly high from their history of tracking deals and the largest since Q1 2008’s 109 deals. Of these deals, 31 disclosed their values for a total of over $5.5 billion, averaging over $180 million per deal. This is more than four times the average deal size seen a year ago.

Information technology companies represented nearly three quarters of the 111 M&A deals (81 total), besting life sciences and non-high technology with just 21 and 9 deals respectively. Within the IT category, software and Internet snagged 61 of the 81 deals but accounted for just over half of the disclosed value of those deals. Life sciences companies continued to rake in more serious cash at a higher rate as over $2.9 billion was spent on their 21 deals; IT companies managed just over $2.2 billion.

Though 2009 saw just 12 venture-backed IPOs, Q1 2010 has already seen 9 IPOs, the largest quarterly amount since the offering-rich 2007 which saw 86 total IPOs valued at over $10 billion. This quarter’s offerings were more evenly distributed among the sectors than the M&A figures, as IT and life sciences saw 4 and 3 IPOs respectively. NVCA president Mark Heesen says the new numbers have “engendered a cautious optimism” within the VC industry.

“The IPO volume, while not nearly enough to declare a recovery, has shown the most improvement since the financial crisis began and the pipeline of companies in registration continues to build. The record breaking number of venture-backed acquisitions is also encouraging as the quality of these transactions appears to have held strong. It is premature to suggest we have permanently turned the corner, but that corner is in sight and within reach as long as we can continue this positive upwards trajectory over the next consecutive quarters,” says Heesen.

What this all boils down to is that venture-backed companies are more likely to find merger and acquisition deals before them this year than they have in several years. Additionally, the IPO data suggests that more of these companies could be going public in 2010 than did during the 2008/2009 slump.

This is a great sign for startups because when more companies are being bought or are going public, that means the economy is starting to turn around and that VCs will likely be more willing to invest in new companies. As we mentioned back in January, VCs were expected to spend more in Q1 2010 after raising an increased amount of funds in the final quarter of 2009. VC spending data on this first quarter should be out in the next few weeks from the NVCA, so stick around to see how those figures hashed out.

Discuss

Apple’s latest gadget, the iPad tablet, is off to a solid start, with more than 300,000 already sold. And it’s a really nice device, we can confirm after spending a good chunk of the last two days with one.

Indeed, it may represent the future of portable computing… someday, maybe.

But the real story for Apple right now — and at least for the next few years — is still the iPhone.

Why?

For developers, it’s still the only opportunity at Apple right now to sell MILLIONS of copies of a mobile app. The iPad will take a year or more to reach 5 million users. But the iPhone and iPod touch have more than 75 million users. That has allowed thousands of companies to make money from their apps, whether paid, ad-supported, or financed by virtual goods.

For Apple and its investors, it’s still the biggest revenue generator and biggest growth driver, and that’s not going to change soon. The iPhone generated 35% of Apple’s revenue during the December quarter, with iPhone segment growth up 90% year-over-year. With the iPod touch included, it’s even more impressive. (Apple sales grew 32% year-over-year as a whole during the December quarter.)

So that’s why, despite all the buzz around the iPad right now, the more important events are Apple’s iPhone OS 4 preview this Thursday, and its WWDC keynote, where it’s expected to unveil a new, better iPhone in June.

Staying ahead of Google Android, RIM, Microsoft, Palm, HTC, Nokia, and other mobile companies — and growing the iPhone business — is Apple’s priority for the next several years. The smartphone market is still the bigger opportunity than the tablet market. Whatever happens with the iPad is gravy.

Related: 15 Features Apple Must Build Into iPhone OS 4 →

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• 10 Things We Love And Hate About The iPad
• 15 Features Apple Must Build Into iPhone OS 4
• Apple Will Show Off The Next iPhone OS On April 8

[JURIST] Lawyers for an Algerian national detained at Guantanamo Bay on Monday filed an emergency motion in the US District Court for the District of Columbia to block the detainee’s transfer to his home country. Petitioner Ahmed Belbacha renewed his request for an administrative stay of a February court order mandating the transfer. The motion alleges that flaws in an earlier court order and new circumstances in the case motivate a ruling in favor of Belbacha:
With respect, the Court seriously misapprehended Mr. Belbacha’s earlier request for an administrative stay. In addition, a fresh development – an announcement on Friday that the Attorney General will meet this week with the Algerian Minister of Justice – underscores the need for an administrative stay. As this Court recently recognized, the “potential harm” that Mr. Belbacha faces if he is transferred to Algeria is “significant” and “substantial.” The case for an administrative stay is especially strong because there is substantial question as to the Court’s jurisdiction to issue the February 4 Order.Belbacha has argued that he will be subjected to abuse and criminal prosecution if returned to Algeria, a situation that his counsel argues necessitates the emergency court order. Belbacha relies on the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees have a right to challenge their imprisonment, which resulted in a spate of detainee suits against the federal government. Last month, the US Supreme Court declined to rule in the case known as Kiyemba II, in which the court was asked to consider issues surrounding the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees. Lawyers for four Chinese Muslim Uighurs detained at Guantanamo were appealing an April ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Columbia Circuit, which held that US courts cannot prevent the government from transferring Guantanamo detainees to foreign countries on the grounds that detainees may face prosecution or torture in the foreign country. The case is separate from a case the court remanded to the DC circuit court earlier last month, known as Kiyemba I. The US government has prevailed in 12 of the 46 habeas corpus cases decided in the DC District Court since the Boumediene ruling.

We’ve all heard of “Housewives Behaving Badly,” but The Real Housewives of New York City’s Alex McCord is set to raise more than a few well-arched eyebrows with the revelation that she routinely drank alcohol will pregnant with her son Francois.

“Throughout my pregnancy, I gave into every craving I felt,” Alex writes in her new book, Little Kids Big City: Tales From A Real House In New York City, The New York Daily News’ Gatecrasher reported Monday. “When I wanted to have a drink, I did.” She even fesses up to downing champagne on her way to the hospital while in labor.

Earlier this season, it was rumored that Alex and her husband Simon would be dropped from the cast of the show’s current third season. The Real Housewives of NYC airs Thursdays on Bravo.

(This guest post previously appeared at the author’s Congressional site)

As we head into the summer driving season and gasoline prices are again creeping up, the administration has announced plans to explore opening up more off-shore areas for exploration and drilling.  On the one hand this can be lauded as a positive step.  On the other hand, it is too little, much too late to have any meaningful or long-term effect on what Americans pay at the pump any time soon, if at all.

Indeed, if increasing domestic energy production was really a priority, the administration would direct the EPA to remove its many roadblocks and barriers to energy production.  In fact, abolishing the EPA altogether would do much to improve our country’s economy.  Instead of protecting the environment as they are supposed to do, most of what they do simply chills the economy.  Polluters should be directly liable in court to any and all parties they harm, rather than bureaucrats at the EPA.

Of course, last week’s announcement was couched in terms of removing barriers and red tape.  However, the fact that we had these barriers in the first place is yet another reminder of how the energy market is hampered and controlled by bureaucrats and central planners in Washington, rather than the demands of the people and the decisions of private investors.

Consider how extremely negative our government’s reaction has been to other governments around the world that have nationalized their oil and energy industries, such as Venezuela and Iran.  We deposed a democratically elected leader in Iran in 1953 for this very reason.  Yet the level of involvement of our government and bureaucrats in energy is nearly absolute.  Of course, the only thing worse than our government dictating energy decisions to its own citizens is our government dictating energy decisions to the citizens of other countries.

Along with the waste of prohibitions that leave our own natural resources untapped is the waste our government perpetrates with subsidies to alternative fuel sources.  There is certainly profit to be made in perfecting cheaper, cleaner fuel sources, but government subsidy programs interfere with finding realistic long-term solutions.  Subsidies divert resources towards certain politically-favored fuel types while ignoring others.  If the market were left alone, private investors would put their own capital into the most promising alternative fuels.  Instead, due to government incentives, resources are concentrated into politically chosen endeavors that could very well end up being dead ends.  Meanwhile, precious time and money is wasted.

The government has the opposite of the Midas touch.  This has been observed over and over by the reduced quality and rising prices in every private industry in which it entangles itself.  Yet somehow people still seem willing, even eager, to relinquish to government control the most important and sensitive portions of our economy and society.  Education, healthcare, and energy are all unfortunate examples of industries that are in my opinion, far too important to be left to government control when it is the market that has the golden touch.

Join the conversation about this story »

Apple has released a new version of iTunes, iTunes 9.1 which changes how certain things work. If you have upgraded to iTunes 9.1, several programs will start giving you an error that ASL.dll is missing.

This problem also occurs while trying to jailbreak iPhone using Blackra1n, when running the executable will give you an error saying that ASL.dll is missing as shown in the above screenshot.

The solution for this is simple, you will need to place the Blackra1n executables in the Apple folder under Common files in Program Files. The folder would be located in the following locations:

32 Bit – C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support

64 Bit – C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support

Once you copy the blackra1n executable to the above folder, create a shortcut for it on the desktop and double-click it to run it as usual.

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Some of the weird wildlife on Madagascar—its mammals especially—probably arrived there by rafting from mainland Africa, we reported back in January. But not its blind snakes. According to a study out now in Biology Letters, these funny-looking creatures date back 150 million years to the Gondwana landmass, and have lived on Madagascar since before it broke off from India and drifted away. And, the researchers say, their story of spreading around the world carries many more twists.

Growing to about a foot long, blind snakes act a lot like worms, burrowing under the surface of every continent except Antarctica. Unlike worms, though, blind snakes have backbones and tiny scales [National Geographic]. They earned their moniker by having blurry vision and sensing chemicals through their skin to find their way around. But despite having backbones, there are few blind snakes in the fossil record, making it hard for researchers to study their evolutionary history. So lead researchers Blair Hedges and Nicolas Vidal had to rely on living species. They extracted five nuclear genes, which code for proteins, from 96 different species of worm-like snakes to reconstruct the branching pattern of their evolution, allowing the team to estimate the times of divergence of different lineages using molecular clocks [UPI].

Vidal and Hedges found that the snakes date back all the way to Gondwana, and that the particular kind that live now on Madagascar date back to “Indigascar,” the name researchers use for the landmass of Madagascar and India before they separated nearly 100 million years ago. Says Hedges, “Then some of resident blind snakes left and dispersed over land to other areas in southern Asia” [LiveScience], while the ones left on Madagascar eventually became a separate family.

But they also found something rather unlikely: These small snakes must have done at least some of their worldwide travels by rafting across the water. They say that blind snakes showed up in Australia 28 million years ago, but at that time no land connections to the continent remained. And African and South American blind snake lineages apparently separated only 63 million years ago. That’s some 40 million years after Africa and South America split up, so moving landmasses can’t have caused the later evolutionary divide [National Geographic].

Burrowing animals don’t tend to travel by rafting, Hedges acknowledges. But because the timetable doesn’t work out for the snakes to have spread to those places by continental drift, and because blind snakes aren’t exactly the flying type, she says this unlikely answer is the most likely one.

Related Content:
80beats: Study: Madagascar’s Weird Mammals Got There by Rafts
80beats: Madagascar Chameleon Makes the Most of a 4-Month Life
Discoblog: Scientists Find Oddball Right-Side-Up Bat in Madagascar
DISCOVER: A Bridge To Madagascar

Image: Blair Hedges

Analyzing Financial Statements

… This topic could be and is a full semester course at some business schools. It is a deep and rich topic that I can’t cover in one single blog post. But it is also a relatively narrow skill set at its most developed levels. If you are going to be a public equity analyst, you need to understand this stuff cold and this post will not get you there.

But if you are an entrepreneur being handed financial statements from your bookkeeper or accountant or controller, then you need to be able to understand them and I’d like this post to help you do that. I’d also like this post help those of you who want to be more confident buying, holding, and selling public stocks. So that’s the perspective I will bring to this topic.

In the past three weeks, we talked about the three main financial statements, the Income Statement, the Balance Sheet, and the Cash Flow Statement. This post is going to attempt to help you figure out how to analyze them, at least at a cursory level…

I’ve put time on my calendar to read and study these posts. (In my life only scheduled things happen. Your life may vary.)

In the new issue of the New Yorker, James Surowiecki has an article
comparing the debt problems of our states to the member states of
the EU. Surowiecki points out that unlike European states, our states
get “automatic fiscal stabilizers” from the federal government, which
eases the problems.

But for all that, I think he’s rather too
sanguine about the fortunes of American states. For one thing, while
it’s true that the US government has greater institutional capacity to
transfer money from feds to states, Europe may have a larger incentive.
If a member state defaults, the euro may well go under, causing havoc
across the eurozone as their currency falls apart, and lenders start
demanding currency risk premia. If California defaults . . . well, a
bunch of other states will get the fish eye from the financial market,
but this probably won’t translate up to the national level.

Perhaps
more importantly, I think he dramatically underweights the risk of
moral hazard:

All this aid comes at a price, of course: it
increases moral hazard, and it increases the national deficit. But the
federal government is able to borrow money at exceptionally cheap rates,
and, at a time like this, when the economy is still trying to find its
feet, forcing states to cancel building projects and furlough teachers
and policemen makes little economic sense. (Indeed, there’s a strong
case to be made that more of the original stimulus package should have
gone to state aid.) The European model would do more harm than good, as
American history shows: in the early eighteen-forties, after the
bursting of a credit bubble, many states found themselves in a debt
crisis. The federal government refused to bail them out, and eight
states defaulted–a move that cut off their access to credit and helped
sink the economy deeper into depression. The U.S. did then what Europe
is doing now, putting the interests of fiscally stronger states above
the interests of the community as a whole. We seem to have learned our
lesson. If Europe wants to be more than just Germany and a bunch of
other countries, it should do the same.

The moral hazard involved
is no small thing. We’ve already introduced quite a lot of it into the
banking system, but at least the CEOs of those banks got the sack, and
the rest have some genuine fear that regulators will get more involved
in their business. The Federal government is constitutionally
prohibited from the kind of prudential regulation that would be
necessary in the wake of bailouts.

This is particularly worrisome
because of the nature of the state problems. This is not a classic
sovereign debt issue, where there’s a giant overhang of high-interest
bonds that can be renegotiated at a haircut, or bought down by money
from outsized sources. What the states have is a bunch of other
obligations, especially to current and past employees. I don’t see how
these can be bought down, and there are substantial legal and political
(not to say moral) issues with asking, say, current pensioners to “take a
haircut.”

If the feds bail out these states, they’re assuming
an ongoing obligation–and encouraging other states to let their fiscal
problems get as big as possible, so Uncle Sugar will have to pay off.
Leaving aside any ideological questions about robbing Peter to pay Paul,
and the proper size of government, the federal government simply
cannot afford to take on all these new obligations–and if it did, its
ability to borrow money would rapidly become unsustainable.

Sure,
there’s nothing wrong with giving states temporary assistance to keep
the recession from hitting too hard–but we’re approaching the point
where that’s not really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about
letting states make big promises without bothering to find sustainable
sources of revenue with which to pay for them. That’s not something the
federal government can afford to encourage.

Jury selection is slated to start next week in the long-delayed corruption trial of Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez.

After a lengthy investigation, Perez was arrested twice last year in the detailed case that stems from improvements to his home on Bloomfield Avenue near the University of Hartford.

Depending on various factors, jury selection could take four weeks in the high-profile case.

The Hartford Courant’s Steve Goode has the details at http://www.courant.com/community/hartford/hc-perez-trial-0405.artapr04,0,1858259.story

Stock buybacks are on the rise again but the impact to investors may not be all that great, says David Rosenberg,chief economist and strategist, Gluskin Sheff & Associates. Rising dividends, on the other hand, are definitely good news. 

While share repurchases have increased 37% quarter-over-quarter and almost 100% from the 2009 lows, the vast majority of companies have bought back stock only to offset dilution from expiring stock options, Mr. Rosenberg noted to clients. 

Indeed, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, just 50 of 214 buybacks resulted in share count reductions.

A more constructive trend, he said, is that companies are starting to pay out more of their retained earnings in dividends. In the first quarter, net dividend increases equaled $5.1-billion, the most since the fourth quarter of 2007.

David Pett 

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki yesterday announced promising news for veterans of the Persian Gulf War experiencing the broad range of symptoms referred to as Gulf War Illnesses…

The first group of Oregon’s Citizen-soldiers returned to Fort Lewis, Wash., April 3, signaling the beginning of the end of the 41 Infantry Brigade Combat Team’s nearly year-long deployment to Iraq…