Latest Lists

What is the average cost of a consumer mailing list? I would like cost per listing for email and direct mail but not phone. The target market is college students. Thanks!

where can i find consumer mailing list? I have a lot of letters to mail and need mailing lables

What are the best mailing list companies for consumers interested in head, body and facial massage? I'm in the process of putting my 1st project together, and would like to know the best consumer lists for my target market, reaching prospective customers by direct mail.

What are the best mailing lists of uk consumers interested in massage?

How do I delete deceased relatives from mailing lists? My grandfather passes away 11 years ago and I still receive mail (republican party, credit card solicitations, consumer surveys, etc). I know its all junk mail, but after 11 years, the databases should be updated. Writing deceased on the envelope and returning has not worked for the past 11 years. Neither has calling the companies. Does anyone know how to get in touch with those companies that sell demographic data so THAT can be updated?

consumer help!!!!? I need to obtain a consumer mailing list,Does anyone know how? Any website or any info would be very helpful.I need a list asap.

****Check Systems Mailing List****? As everyone knows check cashing is big business and I found a bank that will offer second chance checking account with mastercard debit card with only $25.00 opening balance (I am a customer). I want to market this information to consumers who does not have a checking account and tired of paying check cashing fees. Does anyone know how to obtain a mailing list of consumers who are in check systmems?

Consumer Organizations --- List with addresses and mail id's needed urgently. Thanks?

Does anyone know of a good companies that I can secure a mailing list that has fresh leads for catalog shopper I am looking for a reputable company that I can secure fresh leads for consumers who do alot of catalog shopping for the home and gift purchases

what sre specs? i am trying ta receive a consumer mailing list and he ask me what my specs are

Pay Per Click Google Adwords or Consumer (opt in) Mail Shot - Whats better? I have a property related website - its for holiday home owners to advertise their property for sale or rent privately - no agents, commission etc. I have done a lot of the free SEO - ie I have a blog, keywords on website, submit articles, directories etc and now I am ready to step things up a bit... I have already paid for an advert in a property/holiday publication... What is better - pay per click with Google OR paying a UK company to send a mailshot to their opt-in list of consumers who have registered an interest in overseas property in some way (maybe ticked a survey that they own a holiday home etc) PPC looks to be a lot cheaper - mailshots are around £100 per thousand emails (the price goes down the more you send) Any advice on how to increase exposure for my website and whether PPC or consumer emails are worth it and which is better? Thanks a lot

secret consumer? i just signed up for this secret consumer program...they said i get access to a list of merchants participating. anyone know how i access this list or if they mail me something? anyone who has expierience thanx

Consumer Reward Program? So has anyone else gonna a letter and a check in the mail like this I received a letter from this company this afternoon stating I had won a consumer lottery, the total amount I had supposedly won was $39,000, and it included a check for $3,900 and instructed me to call either of two representatives. The number listed is 905-598-6708 and the agents names were listed as Nicole Jordan or Larry Johnson. I called the number and spoke with 'Nicole' who spoke with what I now feel is a faked accent since reading the other posts on this site. I was instructed to deposit the check into my bank account and then call back for further instructions after doing so. 'Nicole' said I would receive my remaining award amount via UPS. After making the deposit, I called her back and she asked if the funds were available to me and of course they were not. She then informed me that it should only take 24 hours for it to clear and to call them back after noon on Monday, January 26, 2009. This is obviously a scam to gain access to people's bank accounts. The check was labeled as if it were a Cashier's Check. Be Wary!! I was skeptical yet I went along for the ride until I googled the company, and voila!

What laws protect consumers from businesses publishing debtors status? I received a first bill in the mail from my dentist' office stating on the letter and plainly visible through the window on the envelope that the debt was past due. In no way was the debt past due and if this were a financial services company, the FDCPA would apply. Any thoughts on what laws would apply to this? I do know that it is against the law to do this as this is why a supermarket can not post a list of people who bounced checks etc. I am trying to find out the exact law. Any help would be appreciated!

How does " Cesar's Picks" help you get a nice vehicle? Cesar Zebina - Kip Killmons Tysons Ford offers his personal e- mail monthly to consumers that want a nice quality vehicle . With over 26 years of experience and great customer service The vehicles on Cesar's list are the best vehicles for value- condition and overall quality . cesarspicks@yahoo.com

advice on airline consumer complaint? I was wondering if someone could give me some advice on my complaint letter. ============================================== I recently purchased online tickets with your company under booking reference XXXXXXX and due to unforeseen circumstances was forced to change the outbound flight to a later date. After logging into your website to the ‘manage your booking’ screen I found that the option to change flight details was not available. This left me no option but to ring your call centre to change the details. When I spoke to your customer services call centre I was told that the further charges amounted to £261 plus the credit card booking fee of £4.57, taking the total amount payable to £265.57. Whilst I completely disagree with the £27.50 per person per way administration fee to simply change a name on a computer screen, this charge is clearly stated on your website and therefore I was aware of this charge. On calculation of the remainder costs I was disappointed to find that I had been charged a further £6 per person as the change to the flight details was made as a telephone fare and not a web fare. Whilst I understand that the cheapest fares are available on the internet, thus prompting me to book this way in the first instance, I am appalled to see that you apply this extra difference in fare when you do not give the option to change the booking on the screen. On complaint to your call centre (a further 30 minutes on the phone, at 10p per minute, therefore a £3 call charge) I was advised that bookings including wheelchair users and infants are not able to change bookings on the internet and so have to make these changes by telephone. There is nowhere on your confirmation or terms and conditions stating that changes to a booking that includes infants must be made by telephone. I am sure that you can understand my disappointment that I have been charged a further £36 in price difference because your company does not allow me to change details on the internet. Incidentally, during this telephone complaint, I was challenged as to who the lead passenger of the booking was. When the booking was made I named myself as the lead passenger. After I had paid the charges to change the flight date the lead passenger was changed by your company and therefore I was presented with a challenge as to ‘guess’ the name of the passenger your company had decided to allocate as lead passenger. On a further, more important note, the 2nd confirmation email to confirm the booking change does not list any booked luggage on the inbound flight. I am now left to assume that we are actually allowed to bring our luggage home with us and do not have to post them back by surface mail!! To finalise, as I mentioned above, although I disagree with your administration charge to change a booking date so far in ahead of the travel date on a paperless budget airline, these charges are clearly stated and I had no other alternative. However, I am entering a complaint on the level of discrimination to be told that wheelchair users and bookings with infants who are not allowed to change their bookings online are then left subject to a higher price. I enclose a copy of your current website terms and conditions for you to see that there is no mention of extra charges being applied if your booking includes wheelchair users or infants. I would like to take the opportunity to charge you £30.00 for the administration costs of this letter and look forward to receiving a reply from you challenging why you think the extra costs are justified and do not present a claim of discrimination. With regards Mrs XXXXXX Enc. JET2.COM Terms and Conditions I forgot to include on the end that I have mentioned discrimination under the Equal Status Act as prevention of access to services due to family status. My opinion is that if I was a wheelchair user there would be a good sound claim for disability discrimination and although I cannot refer to this I do feel that I am being discriminated against. jamesoliver, I'm not sure if I have got the wrong end of the stick but I feel that I actually am being treated different than everyone else hence the claim of discrimination. I understand that there are others with infants who also pay this fee but I am making the point clear that it shouldn't be allowed as it clearly is discrimination. It's people making complaints that forces policy changes and so more people should do the same. It's not my fault if they don't complain but it is my fault if I don't complain!

Experian Problems? Before you respond with "dispute online" - understand that this problem is past that point. I received my credit report from all three agencies & once again, Experian has a discrepancy that was resolved in 2004 still showing. When the discrepancy was resolved, I provided each agency with copies of documentation. Two agencies took care of the discrepancy. Experian has not. I disputed online. They "investigated" & came back w/ no change. Once you dispute once, it is not allowed to dispute online again. Believe me, I tried! I contacted the company connected to the discrepancy & confirmed that it had been resolved in 2004. I filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission online. I provided all the same information, including my contact person (who was still my contact person three years later!) that I had provided to Experian.Now I would like to mail Experian a letter & provide, once again, the documentation,certified of course. Yet, there is no consumer address listed. Anyone??

What about that rebate?? who has been there? 10 points for the best story heres A good one....? I knew better, and I still walked right into it. It all started with Best Buy. (I hear your gasp of horror already. I know, I know: How many sob stories have begun with that phrase? Some day children will try to scare each other with stories set in large consumer electronic chain stores. "'The call is coming from INSIDE THE COMP USA!'") According to the August 15, 1999 Sunday paper, they had computer memory on sale, cheap cheap cheap. Their price was low to begin with, and the $30 mail-in rebate made it a great deal. I'd been meaning to add more memory to my computer for a while, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Granted, I had to go by Best Buy on a Sunday. See, our local Best Buy is in a shopping center along with a Wal-Mart, a Barnes & Noble, and any other number of shrines to consumerism. This wouldn't be so bad if the shopping center in question weren't in its own cul-de-sac, with only one road feeding it from the main highway nearby. Getting into the shopping center isn't hard. It's getting out that will try your patience, especially on a weekend. But for those memory prices, I'd gladly brave the horrors of traffic and the throngs of people whose job, near as I can tell, is to wander around Best Buy staring slack-jawed at the miracles of modern electronics and in general getting in people's way. I made it to the Best Buy just fine. I made my way through the crowd of people milling about the store, finally arriving at the computer department. No one was at the desk. The memory was kept in locked glass cabinets; without an employee, there was no way to get the memory. There was one person in front of me at the counter. I waited for about ten minutes, watching other people wander around the computer department and listening to one of the sales staff explain the wonders of Compaq laptops to a customer. Finally, I asked the guy in front of me how long he'd been waiting for help. "Oh, about forty minutes," he told me. "Hold my spot," I told him, then went in search of help. Both of the employees I could see were busy with customers. I decided to bother the guy hawking Compaqs. "Say, we've been waiting a while," I said, pointing to the man at the counter who by this point was slumped against it as if all the life was being drained from his body. "Can you get someone to help us?" "Oh, you need Frank. He's got the key." "Where's Frank?" "I dunno. He went on break a little while ago. He should be back soon." "Soon" in this case meant "fifteen minutes." I spent the time chatting with the guy in front of me in line. "I never come here if I can help it," he said. "But their prices on some stuff are so good, I end up breaking my vow never to come here again." Frank eventually showed up. "We're both after some of that 64Mb of memory that's on sale," my new-found friend told Frank. Frank glanced towards the cabinet. "Oh, we've sold out of that." I took another look at the cabinet. There were packages of memory in the slot labelled "64Mb memory". "What's that?" I asked, pointing. Frank took a closer look at the cabinet. "That's just some 32Mb memory. We ran out of room for it in its usual spot." Oh, lovely. "When do you expect to get some more memory in?" "Trucks come on Tuesday morning. Check back with us then." I made my way back out of the store, pushing my way past an insanely long line at the customer service desk. I'd have to wait, or try some of the other Best Buy stores in the region. On Monday, I asked Misty to stop by the Best Buy in Raleigh on her way home from work. At the time she worked on the far side of Raleigh, so could swing by on her way back from work and pick some up. They didn't have any, she was told, but should be restocked "on Tuesday morning." We decided to call before bothering with another trip to either store. Misty and I spent the next few days trying to get a call through to the Best Buy in either Raleigh or Durham. The procedure went something like this: Dial the number for the computer department. Listen to it ring for a while. Eventually hang up. Try the number for the customer service department instead. Listen to the phone ring. If you're lucky, someone finally answers. Tell the person, "I'm trying to find out if you have any of the 64Mb of memory that was advertised in your Sunday circular." The person who answered the phone will say something like, "Mrbl fll mmtm." Do not be alarmed; this is normal. Wait on hold while Mumble Man goes to get an employee from the computer department on the phone, or to check the stock himself. After a while, either the phone will spontaneously hang up on you, or another Mumble Man will pick up the phone. If the latter occurs, go back three steps. Misty eventually short-circuited this process by asking for a customer service manager. The manager was able to tell her that, yes, they had some of the memory. After work she stopped by to buy two packages of memory. It took her over an hour to get someone to wait on her and get her the memory. But never mind that, I had my memory! I popped the memory in the computer, filled out my rebate forms, and sent them in the mail to PNY Technologies, Inc. When I first went to Best Buy on Sunday I had grabbed a number of the necessary rebate forms, and I decided to keep one of the extras, since it had contact information in the unlikely case that my rebates didn't arrive. September passed, then October. The form had said to wait eight weeks from the closing date of the offer, September 4th, before bugging them about the rebate. By November 10th, I had tired of waiting. I called the 1-888 number listed on the card. It was busy. Okay, no problem, I thought. I'll just send e-mail to the address on the card. The e-mail I sent came back. No such account at Prodigy. I kept trying to call that 1-888 number. I called early in the day. I called late in the afternoon. I would walk past the phone in my office, then spring towards it and punch in the number quickly, in the hopes of surprising PNY. The line was always busy. After a week of this, I did a little research and got the number for PNY corporate headquarters. (It's 973-515-9700, should this ever happen to you.) Before calling that number, I decided to try the 1-888 number once again. Lo and behold, it rang. To my amazement, someone picked up the phone. To my further amazement, she was helpful. I explained that I hadn't received my rebate for the two packages of memory I'd bought. She tapped away on her computer for a few minutes, then told me that PNY had sent the checks, but that the post office had returned them. She asked me for my address. I gave it to her. "Huh," she said. "That's the same address as we have in our computers. Well, don't worry. We'll get your rebate to you. It'll take about four weeks." It didn't even take that long. On Monday, December 6th, the check arrived. I tore it open. The check was for $30. It only covered half of the rebate I was due. Again I tried calling the 1-888 number. Again it was busy. This time I decided not to fool around. I called corporate headquarters and asked to speak to someone about my rebate. They sent me to extension 2002, where I spoke to a man named Gerald. He took my information and promised to pass it on to "the person who takes care of this." He also assured me that, since it was so close to Christmas, the rebate center was swamped, and that my second check was probably delayed. "Give it another few weeks," he asked. I gave it another few weeks, by which time it was Christmas, and then New Year's. The check hadn't arrived by the 6th, and the whole world hadn't descended into chaos because of the Y2K bug, so it was time to call PNY Technologies, Inc. again. The 1-888 number was (surprise!) busy. I called corporate H.Q. and spoke to Gerald again. "You're the third person who's called about this this week." Somehow, I wasn't surprised. "Give it one more week." I gave it two, then called back on January 19th. This time I reached an answering machine. I left a message and my number, as if I thought that they might actually call me back. Rather than wait for them to call me, I tried again on the 20th. I got the machine again, so I left another, less civil message. I decided to try again on the 21st. Hey, if nothing else I could start coming up with creative messages to leave on the machine. I was surprised when I got a live person on the phone, a man named Victor. I told him my story, including the part about the missing e-mail address, the busy 1-888 number, and Gerald's "help." He gave me a toll-free number to call in case I ever had to call back, and said, "Give me about five minutes to look up your account. I'll call you back." That was at 3:25. At 3:32 he was back on the phone. "I couldn't find your account. Did you personally buy the memory, or did someone else?" I told him that Misty had bought the memory. He said, "Let me check again. I'll get right back to you." Amazingly enough, he was true to his word. He was back on the phone at 3:39. "One check was sent out previously, and I've authorized you for the second one. It should arrive in three weeks." I was skeptical, but Victor turned out to be correct. On the 8th of February, 2000, my second check arrived. It came in one of those perforated tear-open paper envelopes, and on the inside was a special message to me from PNY Technologies, Inc. and the TCA Rebate Center: STOP! Don't Cash this Check (Trade it in for a Greater Value) SPECIAL OFFER Send your rebate check back to us (to the address on the check), and we will send you The Millennium PassTM, a Y2K solution to keep your computer running properly after January 1, 2000 (A $59.99 value!) When the new year arrives, many computers (even newer ones) will not be able to recognize the difference between dates in the years 1900 and 2000. This problem could cause your computer to behave erratically and even lose data! The Millennium PassTM installs in minutes in your computer, and will fix the Y2K bug instantly. Unlike software solutions, it will not disappear if you re-load system software, and is not subject to virus attacks. It also uses less system resources, since it is an 8-bit add-on card (hardware), and unlike software, it does not use memory or disk space to operate. It becomes a permanent part of your computer, taking over the date/time function of your system. To get the Millennium PassTM (a $59.99 value), simply return this check (send the entire page-do not endorse check). We will ship your Y2K Protection right back to you. I decided not to take them up on this generous offer. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My e-mail format has changed. I want it changed back to the original format or I will drop your services.? Yahoo presented me information about changing the format for listing my e-mails. I don't like the new format. Change me back or lose me as a consumer. WCB

What is the big deal about spam? I just dont get what the big fuss is about spam? Why is spam being targeted so ferociosly; especially when untargeted advertising is a common theme in biz marketing practices. Consumers are forced to: watch commercials, banner ads on the websites they visit, text ads when doing a simple search on a search engine, postcards and junk mail from direct marketers etc So what makes email so special? If I have a website that does real business and I buy a list of emails to spread the word about my business, why should I worry about "being punished" for doing that. What really gets me is that small time entreprenuers who are in business themselves are some of the main people pushing the idea about spam. To me its like saying, youd rather pay Google and Yahoo $$$ for PPC-- Yes, i do understand about XXX ads but people have bulk email folders etc to deal with that So why should real businesses have to suffer if they choose to use bulk email as a marketing tool So its ok to advertise endlessly if you pay for it. Is ok to pay for cable tv but still have to watch commercials. Spam can disappear with just a click of your mouse. I get spam too most of them go to my bulk folder. I bulk folder about once aweek, scan it for anything good then click trash. Iam looking for thoughtful responses not little kids giving me attitude because I have an argument for spam. I just want to know what makes email so untouchable while almost every other method. Is it ok to get junk mail in your real mail box from people that say "You have just won 1 million dollars" whats the real difference. At least with email you are not wasting paper. Iam not looking for stupid people to attack my character. I dont spam and I dont have business yet. Iam trying to assess the market for myself and understand the real problem with spam too but Iam not so emotional about I just erase it. Email is a free communication platform, just like the platform we use to to search for websites. If you pay for cable tv is it fair that you still have to watch commercials on certain channels. I live in America and it is a free market, capitalist system and the laws that govern that nation say it is legal to spam as long as you abide by their guidelines. Why are people so emotional about spam? When there are bigger things to be emotional about it the world? What are homegrown business providers to do, when they have a good business to offer but only a limited amount of funds to advertise? Even big websites like Monster.com sends me spam and I dont hate them for that.

california security deposit - rental management? my husband and i rented a house for a year through a rental management business. they did not receive the keys until aug 27 but the end of our 30 day notice ended on aug 30. 21 days is the required time frame for the security deposit or the itemized list to be mailed out. on sep 27 we called since we didn't receive anything in the mail and we basically got the run around. all we could find out was the house had already been rented out, they didn't know how much we were to get back, and the person in charge has been busy with clients and couldn't be bothered and we wouldn't know anything till monday. we demanded them to figure it out as they passed the 21 days. well that night i did my research on security deposits and found on the department of consumer affairs that since they didn't send anything that they forfeit their right to hold any of the money to pay for any cleaning or repairs. we shampooed the carpets and cleaned like crazy. only thing we could find out from them(over the phone) was that the owner didn't like the paint color we did in the living room. we were told it would be fine as long as it wasn't some crazy color like green. plus there was nothing in the lease about paint. so the next day i called myself and told them that what i found and stated my case clearly in the calmest voice i could get. i couldn't talk to the person in charge of the deposits so i left a message. i was informed she would be in within an hour so i called back about 2 hours late. same response...she would be in in an hour. so this time i told them "i don't want to take this any farthur but she needs to know that we will report them to the bbb department of consumer affairs and department of real estate." we drove 4 hours to get to the rental office. she states its the owner who is in charge of fiving us our deposit and that she hasn't given them anything. so who is at fault here? we got there and she did promise to have the money there tomorrow(monday). the full $1000. since its in our lease that the owner would hold the deposit what action can we take against the business? they made it sound like they couldn't force the owner to pay us. "we can't cut off our nose to spite our face" is what one man said. i mean, they are in this business to help owners that want to rent their property out.

Why is almost everything becoming imported? I received catalogs in mail and was looking for a comforter....the word 'imported' is in almost every description. Also, bra's and curtains are hard to get Made in USA? Some, items are "Made in USA, from imported materials." Can't we make our own fabric products totally? What's goin on? I wasn't totally a domestic consumer, but this is getting out of hand! I then went to Made in USA web sites, and the list of items are so short or products are awful--gaudy and not much choice. A few years ago, I returned a coat with an American flag on the back when discovering the tag stated, "Made in Egypt"????? HU? Yes, we opened up the WTO to more imports and someone left the door open. Sad, when the slogan is now; "USA, Made in China".

Can you translate these English paragraphs to Tagalog about UAE??? Introduction Background: Definition Field Listing The Trucial States of the Persian Gulf coast granted the UK control of their defense and foreign affairs in 19th century treaties. In 1971, six of these states - Abu Zaby, 'Ajman, Al Fujayrah, Ash Shariqah, Dubayy, and Umm al Qaywayn - merged to form the United Arab Emirates (UAE). They were joined in 1972 by Ra's al Khaymah. The UAE's per capita GDP is on par with those of leading West European nations. Its generosity with oil revenues and its moderate foreign policy stance have allowed the UAE to play a vital role in the affairs of the region. Geography Location: Definition Field Listing Middle East, bordering the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, between Oman and Saudi Arabia Geographic coordinates: Definition Field Listing 24 00 N, 54 00 E Map references: Definition Field Listing Middle East Area: Definition Field Listing Rank Order total: 83,600 sq km land: 83,600 sq km water: 0 sq km Area - comparative: Definition Field Listing slightly smaller than Maine Land boundaries: Definition Field Listing total: 867 km border countries: Oman 410 km, Saudi Arabia 457 km Coastline: Definition Field Listing 1,318 km Maritime claims: Definition Field Listing territorial sea: 12 nm contiguous zone: 24 nm exclusive economic zone: 200 nm continental shelf: 200 nm or to the edge of the continental margin Climate: Definition Field Listing desert; cooler in eastern mountains Terrain: Definition Field Listing flat, barren coastal plain merging into rolling sand dunes of vast desert wasteland; mountains in east Elevation extremes: Definition Field Listing lowest point: Persian Gulf 0 m highest point: Jabal Yibir 1,527 m Natural resources: Definition Field Listing petroleum, natural gas Land use: Definition Field Listing arable land: 0.77% permanent crops: 2.27% other: 96.96% (2005) Irrigated land: Definition Field Listing 760 sq km (2003) Total renewable water resources: Definition Field Listing 0.2 cu km (1997) Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural): Definition Field Listing total: 2.3 cu km/yr (23%/9%/68%) per capita: 511 cu m/yr (2000) Natural hazards: Definition Field Listing frequent sand and dust storms Environment - current issues: Definition Field Listing lack of natural freshwater resources compensated by desalination plants; desertification; beach pollution from oil spills Environment - international agreements: Definition Field Listing party to: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection signed, but not ratified: Law of the Sea Geography - note: Definition Field Listing strategic location along southern approaches to Strait of Hormuz, a vital transit point for world crude oil Government Country name: Definition Field Listing conventional long form: United Arab Emirates conventional short form: none local long form: Al Imarat al Arabiyah al Muttahidah local short form: none former: Trucial Oman, Trucial States abbreviation: UAE Government type: Definition Field Listing federation with specified powers delegated to the UAE federal government and other powers reserved to member emirates Capital: Definition Field Listing name: Abu Dhabi geographic coordinates: 24 28 N, 54 22 E time difference: UTC+4 (9 hours ahead of Washington, DC during Standard Time) Administrative divisions: Definition Field Listing 7 emirates (imarat, singular - imarah); Abu Zaby (Abu Dhabi), 'Ajman, Al Fujayrah, Ash Shariqah (Sharjah), Dubayy (Dubai), Ra's al Khaymah, Umm al Qaywayn (Quwayn) Independence: Definition Field Listing 2 December 1971 (from UK) National holiday: Definition Field Listing Independence Day, 2 December (1971) Constitution: Definition Field Listing 2 December 1971; made permanent in 1996 Legal system: Definition Field Listing based on a dual system of Shari'a and civil courts; has not accepted compulsory ICJ jurisdiction Suffrage: Definition Field Listing none Executive branch: Definition Field Listing chief of state: President KHALIFA bin Zayid al-Nuhayyan (since 3 November 2004), ruler of Abu Zaby (Abu Dhabi) (since 4 November 2004); Vice President and Prime Minister MUHAMMAD bin Rashid al-Maktum (since 5 January 2006) head of government: Prime Minister and Vice President MUHAMMAD bin Rashid al-Maktum (since 5 January 2006); Deputy Prime Ministers SULTAN bin Zayid al-Nuhayyan (since 20 November 1990) and HAMDAN bin Zayid al-Nuhayyan (since 20 October 2003) cabinet: Council of Ministers appointed by the president note: there is also a Federal Supreme Council (FSC) composed of the seven emirate rulers; the FSC is the highest constitutional authority in the UAE; establishes general policies and sanctions federal legislation; meets four times a year; Abu Zaby (Abu Dhabi) and Dubayy (Dubai) rulers have effective veto power elections: president and vice president elected by the FSC for five-year terms (no term limits); election last held 3 November 2004 upon the death of the UAE's Founding Father and first President ZAYID bin Sultan Al Nuhayyan (next to be held in 2009); prime minister and deputy prime minister appointed by the president election results: KHALIFA bin Zayid al-Nuhayyan elected president by a unanimous vote of the FSC; MUHAMMAD bin Rashid al-Maktum unanimously affirmed vice president after the 2006 death of his brother Sheikh Maktum bin Rashid al-Maktum Legislative branch: Definition Field Listing unicameral Federal National Council (FNC) or Majlis al-Ittihad al-Watani (40 seats; 20 members appointed by the rulers of the constituent states, 20 members elected to serve two-year terms) elections: elections for one half of the FNC (the other half remains appointed) held in the UAE on 18-20 December 2006; the new electoral college - a body of 6,689 Emiratis (including 1,189 women) appointed by the rulers of the seven emirates - were the only eligible voters and candidates; 456 candidates including 65 women ran for 20 contested FNC seats; one female from the Emirate of Abu Dhabi won a seat note: reviews legislation but cannot change or veto Judicial branch: Definition Field Listing Union Supreme Court (judges are appointed by the president) Political parties and leaders: Definition Field Listing none Political pressure groups and leaders: Definition Field Listing NA International organization participation: Definition Field Listing ABEDA, AFESD, AMF, FAO, G-77, GCC, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICC, ICCt (signatory), ICRM, IDA, IDB, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, IHO, ILO, IMF, IMO, IMSO, Interpol, IOC, IPU, ISO, ITSO, ITU, LAS, MIGA, NAM, OAPEC, OIC, OPCW, OPEC, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UPU, WCO, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WTO Diplomatic representation in the US: Definition Field Listing chief of mission: Ambassador (vacant) chancery: 3522 International Court NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20008 telephone: [1] (202) 243-2400 FAX: [1] (202) 243-2432 consulate(s): New York, Houston Diplomatic representation from the US: Definition Field Listing chief of mission: Ambassador (vacant); Charge d'Affaires Martin R. QUINN embassy: Embassies District, Plot 38 Sector W59-02, Street No. 4, Abu Dhabi mailing address: P. O. Box 4009, Abu Dhabi telephone: [971] (2) 414-2200 FAX: [971] (2) 414-2603 consulate(s) general: Dubai Flag description: Definition Field Listing three equal horizontal bands of green (top), white, and black with a wider vertical red band on the hoist side Economy United Arab Emirates Top of Page Economy - overview: Definition Field Listing The UAE has an open economy with a high per capita income and a sizable annual trade surplus. Despite largely successful efforts at economic diversification, nearly 40% of GDP is still directly based on oil and gas output. Since the discovery of oil in the UAE more than 30 years ago, the UAE has undergone a profound transformation from an impoverished region of small desert principalities to a modern state with a high standard of living. The government has increased spending on job creation and infrastructure expansion and is opening up utilities to greater private sector involvement. In April 2004, the UAE signed a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement with Washington and in November 2004 agreed to undertake negotiations toward a Free Trade Agreement with the US. The country's Free Trade Zones - offering 100% foreign ownership and zero taxes - are helping to attract foreign investors. Higher oil revenue, strong liquidity, housing shortages, and cheap credit in 2005-07 led to a surge in asset prices (shares and real estate) and consumer inflation. Rising prices are increasing the operating costs for businesses in the UAE and adversely impacting government employees and others on fixed incomes. Dependence on oil and a large expatriate workforce are significant long-term challenges. The UAE's strategic plan for the next few years focuses on diversification and creating more opportunities for nationals through improved education and increased private sector employment. GDP (purchasing power parity): Definition Field Listing Rank Order $167.3 billion (2007 est.) GDP (official exchange rate): Definition Field Listing $192.6 billion (2007 est.) GDP - real growth rate: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 7.4% (2007 est.) GDP - per capita (PPP): Definition Field Listing Rank Order $37,300 (2007 est.) GDP - composition by sector: Definition Field Listing agriculture: 1.8% industry: 59.3% services: 38.9% (2007 est.) Labor force: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 3.065 million (2007 est.) Labor force - by occupation: Definition Field Listing agriculture: 7% industry: 15% services: 78% (2000 est.) Unemployment rate: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 2.4% (2001) Population below poverty line: Definition Field Listing 19.5% (2003) Household income or consumption by percentage share: Definition Field Listing lowest 10%: NA% highest 10%: NA% Inflation rate (consumer prices): Definition Field Listing Rank Order 11% (2007 est.) Investment (gross fixed): Definition Field Listing Rank Order 21.8% of GDP (2007 est.) Budget: Definition Field Listing revenues: $58.88 billion expenditures: $38.06 billion (2007 est.) Public debt: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 22.9% of GDP (2007 est.) Agriculture - products: Definition Field Listing dates, vegetables, watermelons; poultry, eggs, dairy products; fish Industries: Definition Field Listing petroleum and petrochemicals; fishing, aluminum, cement, fertilizers, commercial ship repair, construction materials, some boat building, handicrafts, textiles Industrial production growth rate: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 4.3% (2007 est.) Electricity - production: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 57.06 billion kWh (2005) Electricity - consumption: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 52.62 billion kWh (2005) Electricity - exports: Definition Field Listing 0 kWh (2005) Electricity - imports: Definition Field Listing 0 kWh (2005) Oil - production: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 2.54 million bbl/day (2006 est.) Oil - consumption: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 372,000 bbl/day (2005 est.) Oil - exports: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 2.54 million bbl/day (2004 est.) Oil - imports: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 137,200 bbl/day (2004) Oil - proved reserves: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 97.8 billion bbl (2007 est.) Natural gas - production: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 45.07 billion cu m (2005 est.) Natural gas - consumption: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 39.56 billion cu m (2005 est.) Natural gas - exports: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 6.848 billion cu m (2005 est.) Natural gas - imports: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 1.343 billion cu m (2005) Natural gas - proved reserves: Definition Field Listing Rank Order 5.823 trillion cu m (1 January 2006 est.) Current account balance: Definition Field Listing Rank Order $41.67 billion (2007 est.) Exports: Definition Field Listing Rank Order $156.6 billion f.o.b. (2007 est.) Exports - commodities: Definition Field Listing crude oil 45%, natural gas, reexports, dried fish, dates Exports - partners: Definition Field Listing Japan 23.4%, South Korea 10.3%, Thailand 5%, India 4.8% (2006) Imports: Definition Field Listing Rank Order $101.6 billion f.o.b. (2007 est.) Imports - commodities: Definition Field Listing machinery and transport equipment, chemicals, food Imports - partners: Definition Field Listing China 13.1%, India 10.2%, US 8.9%, Japan 6.2%, Germany 6.1%, Italy 4.7% (2006) Economic aid - donor: Definition Field Listing since its founding in 1971, the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development has given about $5.2 billion in aid to 56 countries (2004) Economic aid - recipient: Definition Field Listing $5.36 million (2004) Reserves of foreign exchange and gold: Definition Field Listing Rank Order $76.62 billion (31 December 2007 est.) Debt - external: Definition Field Listing Rank Order $57.52 billion (31 December 2007 est.) Stock of direct foreign investment - at home: Definition Field Listing Rank Order $44.37 billion (2007 est.) Stock of direct foreign investment - abroad: Definition Field Listing Rank Order $14.14 billion (2007 est.) Market value of publicly traded shares: Definition Field Listing Rank Order $138.5 billion (2006) Currency (code): Definition Field Listing Emirati dirham (AED) Exchange rates: Definition Field Listing Emirati dirhams per US dollar - 3.673 (2007), 3.673 (2006), 3.6725 (2005), 3.6725 (2004), 3.6725 (2003) note: officially pegged to the US dollar since February 2002 Fiscal year: Definition Field Listing calendar year Transnational Issues Disputes - international: Definition Field Listing boundary agreement was signed and ratified with Oman in 2003 for entire border, including Oman's Musandam Peninsula and Al Madhah enclaves, but contents of the agreement and detailed maps showing the alignment have not been published; Iran and UAE dispute Tunb Islands and Abu Musa Island, which Iran occupies Illicit drugs: Definition Field Listing the UAE is a drug transshipment point for traffickers given its proximity to Southwest Asian drug-producing countries; the UAE's position as a major financial center makes it vulnerable to money laundering; anti-money-laundering controls improving, but informal banking remains unregulated

Politicians and their Illusion of Power? Take a look a give your opinion:? Critics accuse libertarians of reveling in government failures. Yes and No. No one is pleased to see the destruction caused by government policies, whether small scale, as when a tighter regulation causes business failures, or large scale, as when wars destroy life for millions. The kernel of truth to the claim is this: the failure of government illustrates something extremely important about the structure of reality that most people are likely to forget. It comes down to this: statesmen and public officials, no matter how powerful they may be, cannot finally control social outcomes. If I might offer a summary of a point emphasized in all of Mises's works: the structure of society and world affairs generally is shaped by human actions, stemming from imaginative human minds working out individual subjective valuations, and their interactions with the material world, which is governed by laws that are beyond human control. What that means is that you and I cannot on our own, even if we have maximum political power, control all of human society, and especially not its economic side. Let's first consider an example from current popular wisdom about the manufacturing base. Many products that were once made in the US – thinking here of televisions, pianos, firecrackers, plastics, and bicycles--are now made in China. This has caused a great deal of alarm--all unwarranted, so far as sound economics is concerned. But let's say we have the ambition to change this social outcome. Anyone is free to build a bicycle and attempt to market it to willing buyers. Let's say you rent some property, hire the workers, acquire all the necessary capital, and then put your bike on sale. In order to cover your costs and make a profit, you find that you must price your bikes above the going market price. Maybe you can persuade people that you have a special product that is better than the others. Or maybe yours will sit on the floor. Or maybe you will have to lower your price and you will find that your revenue does not cover your costs, and you have to go out of business. No matter what you decide, this much is clear: you are not dictating the outcome. You wanted to build bikes, but it is the consuming public that decides whether it is in our interest to do so. There is nothing you have to say about it. You cannot make people fork over the money. I would venture to suggest that you will ultimately come to the conclusion that you should be doing other things besides attempting to keep up with other businesses that have lower labor and capital costs and hence can make a profit through selling goods at much lower prices. But let's say you decide that you don't want to bow to the realities of the market. Instead you lobby Congress to tax everyone who buys a bike from overseas. The tax is high enough that you can continue to charge exorbitant prices for your bikes. You make a profit. But at what expense? The consumers who buy your bikes have less income left over for other pursuits, whether consumption, saving, or investment. The workers you are employing are being kept from other pursuits as well, and the capital you are consuming is not available for other projects. Ultimately, you have skewed the entire economic system in a way that benefits you at everyone else's expense. Others have found a way to do what you are doing much more efficiently, but because you lobbied and got your way, society is prevented from benefiting from others' innovations. And how long must this distorted system last? That you managed to tax everyone to benefit you does nothing to change the reality that others can do what you are doing more cheaply and better. Do workers really want to be employed in an industry that is something of an artifice? Do consumers really want to pay high prices just so that you can continue to indulge in your bike-making passion? Clearly not. At some point, people will catch on to the racket, and find other ways to go about acquiring bikes. Maybe they will exploit loopholes in the law that allow them to import bike parts. An industry of do-it-yourself bike building becomes a threat to your profits. Or perhaps black markets will take over. Or maybe people will turn away from bikes altogether and starting trying out new forms of informal transportation. Skateboards are fitted with handlebars. Gas-powered scooters develop a peddle-only option. The very definition of a bike comes into question. Increasingly, enforcement will have to become ever more onerous. At some point in this game, we face a choice. We can continue to impose an ever more absurd and preposterous system of regulations and protections just so that you can benefit, or we can bow to reality and let in foreign bikes for consumer purchase. Let's say your tariff lasts a year or even ten years. What will it accomplish? In that time, vast resources are wasted. Consumers of all sorts are exploited. Capital is consumed in economically wasteful ways. People are pushed around and the police powers of the state grow. It does society no good at all. My point is that whatever the fate of the so-called manufacturing base, there is nothing in the long run that can be done to turn it in one direction or another. The fate of manufacturing is in the hands of consumers at large, and subject to the laws of economics which no man can repeal. It is the outcome of human choice. Now, the Bush administration has thought otherwise and imposed a huge range of protections to benefit its supporters and people who the administration hoped would become its supporters. The result has been to skew the world economy, hobble markets, delay inevitable transitions, and impose massive social costs. What this example shows is that governments are not omnipotent. Many try to be, and no government is liberal by nature. But there are limits. Governments bump up against human valuations time and again. Even in the highly rarified event of a despotic government that rules a population unanimously in support of despotism, government still bumps up against the structure of the world, which resists control. Let us consider another example. Let us say that government desires a strong dollar. But it still wants to print dollars and ship them around the world. In this case, there is nothing that government can do to insure the dollar’s strength against depreciation. Nothing. This is due to the laws of economics. All else equal, the value of a currency in terms of goods falls as its quantity increases. Governments that desire otherwise can only shake their fist in anger. The same is true domestically. The government wants economic recovery before a recession has fully run its course. It thereby drops interest rates, spends vast amounts of money to gin up demand, and otherwise encourages as much consumption as possible. These tactics can result in some short-term gains but it doesn't work in the long run. These tactics deplete savings and capital and weaken the foundation for solid future growth. The issue of the price of prescription drugs will be a big one in this coming campaign. The problem is high prices. Popular wisdom has it that this is because of the greed of the medical industry. The truth is that these high prices are partly a result of subsidized demand due to Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the restricted supply due to patent laws. In other words, the political class is responsible for the high prices. It's true that the pharmaceutical industry is not complaining. In fact, high prices are precisely what its friends in government want to bring about. They may regret that the poor have to pay the higher prices, but not enough to do anything substantive about it. Prices would plummet today if patents were repealed, free trade (including re-importation) allowed, and subsidized demand ended by the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid. But no one wants to consider that solution, so Congress creates ever more intrusive programs designed to control prices, keeping the prices high enough to satisfy the industry but low enough to reduce the political clamor. The problem is that the government can't have it both ways. It cannot reward its friends with high prices and keep consumers happy at the same time. The current system with its large subsidies is only creating massive new liabilities in programs that cannot be funded in perpetuity without massive tax increases that no one is willing to advocate. Absent tax increases, the only answer is inflation, which taxes us in other ways. One way to think about government is as a rat wandering through a maze with no escape. There is no magic solution to getting around basic economic laws. All lunches must be paid for by someone, prices cannot be both high and low at the same time, and all attempts to coerce generate counter-reactions. In short, there is no alternative universe in which the fantasies of politicians come true. But try telling that to the political class. The last thing they want to hear is that their power is limited, that their will is not a way. They are prone to believe that membership in the political class comes with the privilege of shaping the world to their liking. If you read the social science literature, you find the same error at work on a nearly universal basis. Very rarely does anyone come along and say: great theory but it has nothing to do with reality. You are just playing intellectual games. Socialism was really nothing other than an intellectual game. People from the ancient world to the present conjured up some vision of how they would like the world to work and then advocated a series of measures of how to achieve it. Mises and his generation explained that their vision was fundamentally at odds with reality. In the real world, capital must have price rooted in exchange of private property in order for it to be employed in its highest-valued capacity. It solves nothing to say that everyone should own capital collectively. This was the equivalent of pointing out that the Emperor was wearing no clothes. In some ways, what we do as commentators on economic affairs is to follow this model again and again. The other day, a candidate for president suggested that the answer to our economic woes was more regulation. He had it all figured out in his mind. Immediately, free-market economists from all over the world joined forces to point out that his goal of higher economic productivity could not be achieved this way. It was an unwelcome message but one necessary to deliver regardless. The experience of Iraq has provided myriad examples of the same. The US wants to pump oil. It wants to start factories, stores, and commerce generally. But it refuses to put private owners in charge. As a result, all its military muscle has amounted to very little at great expense. It is a classic example of how governments fail when they try to fight against forces they cannot control. Factories in Iraq that have gone into operation have done so without support of the occupying government. And think of the war generally. At the outset, the visionaries in the Bush administration imagined that Iraq was really a very simple problem to solve. It only needed to be decapitated and the magic dust of the US presence would otherwise create an orderly and prosperous society that would be a model for the region. The reality hit. Crime was unleashed. Feuding political factions clamored for control. Production stopped. Society flew into chaos. This was not because of the absence of the political leadership. It was because of the presence of foreign martial law in a country that was seething in resentment against the US. Time and again, we have seen evidence that the Iraq war only accomplished the opposite of its aims. Its purpose was to find weapons, punish terrorism, and bring order to the region. Instead it has fueled terrorism and brought new levels of disorder to the region. Not having done that, the war is then re-defined in terms that reflect whatever government has done: namely to toss out and capture Saddam, In this sense, the war was like any other government program: bringing about the opposite of its stated intentions and doing so at greater expense. Thus do we see the intersection between foreign and domestic policy. Government is famously ham-handed at home and similarly incompetent abroad. No matter how much government claims that it is master of the universe, it constantly confronts forces beyond its control. In all the talk of the calamity of this war, never forget the broader picture: what an incredible opportunity was squandered after the end of the Cold War. The US had emerged as the universally acknowledged ideological victor in that forty-year struggle. That the Cold War was not actually an ideological struggle so much as a classic standoff between two empires is irrelevant for understanding the implications of this fact: totalitarian communism collapsed while the free economic system of the market remained standing in total triumph. The world was ready for a new period of genuine liberalism, and looking to the US. On the verge of an amazing period of technological advance, we were perfectly situated to lead the way. There had never been a time in US history when George Washington's foreign policy made more sense. A beacon of liberty. Trade with all, belligerence toward none. Commercial engagement with everyone, political engagement with as few as possible. The hand of friendship. Good will. This was the prescription for peace and freedom. It was within our grasp. Our children might have grown up in a world without major political violence. A world of peace and plenty. It could have been. But it was not to be, mainly because George W.'s father decided that he wanted to go down in the history books for doing something big and important. What else but war? The US was now the world's only superpower and itching for some fight somewhere. It's a bit like a playground filled with wimps and one boy with a black belt in karate who never absorbed the lesson in how and where to use his fighting skills. And then there was this oil-drilling dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, and Bush decided to intervene. Twelve years later, the US is still there, causing unrelenting havoc for those poor people. Here at home we are given constant examples of the huge gulf that separates government's perceptions of itself versus the reality. The Bush administration wanted to give the steel industry a boost. The administration established tariffs, which amounts to a tax on all consumers of steel. American manufacturers faced a choice of paying the tax to buy imported steel or paying the higher prices for domestic steel. Those who could do neither had to cut back production and hiring in other areas. Other consumers had to pay higher prices, which diverted income from other pursuits. As for the steel industry itself, the tariffs did nothing to help it achieve greater efficiency, which is the only way to deal with more efficient competitors. They only ended up subsidizing inefficiency. Even then, it wasn't enough. During the period of tariffs, the industry dramatically consolidated in order to become more efficient in other ways. Once faced with the prospect of trade wars, the ultimate cost of protectionism, the Bush administration pulled back and repealed the new tariffs, thereby landing the industry in exactly the same predicament it was in before the tariffs were past. As for commercial society as a whole, it paid dramatically higher steel costs, and faced sporadic shortages, for absolutely no reason. Faced with failure on every front, the Bush administration did the right thing and repealed the tariffs. Not that it was honest about the failure. Instead it claimed its policy worked so well that it could now repeal it. This is like a physician prescribing poison and then changing his mind. He can't but try to put the best spin on it, I suppose. But what a beautiful example of the powerlessness of government this is! The Bush administration wanted to save American industry and only ended up vastly raising the costs of doing all forms of business. More cutbacks are inevitable as steel production shifts to other countries and the US finds its comparative advantage elsewhere. Much legislative energy is poured into helping some groups gain favorable treatment in the workplace. I'm thinking here of the usual litany of victim groups as identified according to race, ability, sex, national origin, religion, and the like. Have these laws actually helped the group in question? The results are mixed at best. If you send people out into the workforce with a high price attached to their heads – and the prospect of a lawsuit is a very high price indeed – you only make employers less likely to hire them. I don’t doubt that some people have been helped by these laws, but they are not the people most in need of help. Today, the disabled, blacks, women, and religious minorities go in search of jobs with a major problem: employers fear them on the margin, and, on the margin, are less likely to hire them relative to others, provided they can get away with it. It is the least qualified among them who pay the highest price. A good test case is disability: it is a documented fact that unemployment among the truly disabled is higher today than it was when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. Because libertarians know in advance that government policies are destructive, we tend to focus our editorial energy on pointing to its destructive effects. But in our zeal to draw attention to issues others ignore, let us not forget the bigger picture. There are always limits to what the government can do, and the government's destruction is always accompanied by examples of great creativity on the part of the market. Even as government dominates the headlines, private entrepreneurs are busy every day working to improve products and services that improve our lives. They do it without taxing us or regulating us, or making us suffer through tedious elections or political debates. They make their products and offer them to us in a way that pleases the consuming public the most. We can choose whether we want them or not. Consider the success of Wal-Mart. If government had set out to create a volume discounter that made a world of material goods and groceries available to the multitude in all countries, it might have tried for a thousand years and not created anything resembling this company. Even the military has relented and now routinely points its employees not to its on-base stores but to Wal-Mart, Office Depot, and others for the best prices. Foreign development aid is another example. It took decades to get the message across, but today finance ministers in the developing world understand that they have far more to gain through integration into the world economy than from development aid and all the restrictive policies that come with it. Today, as Sudha Shenoy points out, the largest resistance to new trade deals comes from the developing world, not because they don't want trade but because they desire trade without the labor and environmental controls the US demands. The same is true in the area of communications. In the last century, governments aspired to control them all: the phones, the mails, the media. Today, we see that government, in practice, controls very little of the communications industry, despite every attempt to hobble private enterprise. In that same vein, a major issue for everyone these days are computer viruses and spam, which threaten to make our chief mode of communication less reliable. Congress passes ineffectual legislation against spam and viruses, while private enterprise has given us dozens of means of winning the battle. Private enterprise creates; government destroys. That is the great economic lesson of our times and all times. Of course there is one way in which government never fails. It can loot. It can gain footholds into society's command centers. It can punish enemies. It can even indoctrinate people in its preferred vision of the world through propaganda. This is the best way to understand the public school system. It doesn't work to educate but it does work to transfer vast sums from the private to the public sector. And here too, we see the power of private enterprise: booster clubs in public schools represent a de facto source of privatization, and the clubs and groups connected to them are the only really successful things going on in public school. We’ll hear much in the coming months about all the wonderful reforms politicians are going to bring us. This is the time when politicians vie for our allegiance by telling all about their ideas and vision for the future. As usual, they will parse their words in ways to maximize the numbers of people who are persuaded and minimize the amount of trouble they get into for inadvertently telling people something they don't want to hear. As an aside, whoever came up with this idea of a mass democracy just wasn't thinking things through very clearly. Nothing runs well by majority vote, to say nothing of the fact that a truly free society shouldn't be "run" at all; it works on its own without would-be masters-and-commanders grasping at the helm. Let me then offer to you my own top ten list of political lies you are told, all designed to make you believe that government should have more power than it already has, so that it can create more of the disasters we are accustomed to: 10. My new program will generate jobs. Truth: only the market generates jobs on net. 9. My education program will reform schools so that they leave no child behind. Truth: the public schools do not work for the same reason no government program can work. They exist outside the market economy. 8. My program will save industry x. Truth: industry must be part of the market or else it is not really industry at all. 7. I won't raise your taxes but I will pass lots of new programs: Truth: all programs must be paid for. 6. As president, I will pursue a humble foreign policy. Truth: nothing in the office of the president encourages humility. 5. This war is humanitarian and winnable. Truth: war is nothing but a government program on a massively destructive scale, and just as error prone. 4. My reform will bring market-based competition. Be on the lookout for this lie, which market partisans are likely to believe. There is only one kind of genuine market, and it is rooted in private property and nothing else. 3. We will secure the nation. Truth: government cannot provide security better than markets, any more than it can provide food or houses better than the market. 2. Government is compassionate. Truth: men who seek power over the lives of others are the coldest, cruelest humans of all. 1. You can't love your country and hate your government. Truth: A person who loves his country loves liberty first. One hundred years from now, the great story of the latter part of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century will be the vast improvements in life wrought by technology. Consider the web, the cell phone, the PDA, the affordable laptop computer, advances in medicine, and the spread of prosperity to all corners of the globe. What has government had to do with this? The answer is: nothing contributory. It has worked only to impede progress, and we can only be thankful that it hasn't succeeded. Through all of human history, governments have caused frightening levels of bloodshed and horror, but in the end, what has prevailed is not power but the market economy. Even today governments can only play catch-up. This is because of the reasons that Mises outlined. Government cannot control the human mind, so it cannot, in the long run, control the choices people make. It cannot control economic forces, which are a far more powerful and permanent feature of the world than any government anyway. Governments have a propensity to overreach in so many areas of life that their exercise of power itself leads to their own undoing. The overreach can take many forms: financial, economic, social, and military. In this way, and with enough passion for liberty burning in the hearts of the citizenry, governments can be responsible for their own undoing. It comes about as a result of overestimating the capacity of power and underestimating its limits. I believe this is happening in our time. It may not be obvious when taking the broad view, but when you look at the status of a huge range of government programs and institutions, what you see is a government that is at once enormously powerful and rich, but also fragile and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Events of the last year indicate just how far the government has slipped in its ability to manage the economy, society, culture, and world order. Despite the exalted status of the state today, the vast and sprawling empire called the US government may in fact be less healthy than it ever has been. A few months back, we had a special speaker come to Auburn, probably the most famous man who has visited us since the Country and Western star Alan Jackson was in town. He was Mikhail Gorbachev, a very interesting figure in the history of nations. He came to power with the reputation of a reformer and instituted many reforms that were designed not to give more liberty to the people, but to stop the unraveling of an empire before it was too late. But it was too late. All his talk of perestroika and glasnost couldn't fool the people, who had become convinced that the Soviet machine was something of a hoax. The empire unraveled not because of him, but despite his efforts to save it. When it came time to make the critical decision of whether to try to hold the empire together by more and more force, or not, history had already made the choice for him. The empire dissolved in the blink of an eye. Not too many months later, he was out of a job, not because he was recalled in some formal process, but because the forces of history had run him over. Democratic governments are not immune from the forces of history that overthrew Soviet tyranny. All governments overreach and no government is permanent. So let us fear government but not exaggerate its powers. It can cause enormous damage and it must always be fought. But in this struggle, we are on the right side of history. The power of human choice, aided by the logic of economics and the laws that operate without any bureaucrat's permission, are our source of hope for the future. _______________________________ Llewellyn H. Rockwell http://www.mises.org/story/1396

I applied for my first credit card, but i was denied! Why is this? I'm a twenty year-old college student who applied at Chase Bank for my first credit card, along with opening a free checking account, last week. My card was supposed to come in the mail, but instead I got a letter that said this: "After reviewing the information provided in your application and your credit bureau report, we regret that we are unable to approve your request for a credit account at this time. The reason(s) for our decision are as follows: Few revolving accounts opened long enough to establish credit history Not enough accounts opened long enough to establish a credit history Our credit decision was based in whole or in part on information obtained in a report from the consumer reporting agency listed below. The reporting agency did not make the credit decision and is unable to provide you with the specific reasons for our decision." What on earth did I do wrong?! How can I have bad credit when I've never even applied for a credit card in my life?!

Micro chip question a couple of days ago, Want more info? The question asking for opinions on micro chipping seemed to be 'for', but do you really understand what it means? Here's another thought: On March 11, 2009, R-CALF USA President Max Thornsberry, D.V.M., testified at a congressional subcommittee hearing on USDA's National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Dr. Thornsberry presented a powerful case against NAIS, but the witnesses were clearly stacked in favor of mandatory NAIS. Most of the members of the U.S. House Agriculture Committee's Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry (Subcommittee) who attended the hearing also appeared to favor NAIS. Our best chance to stop NAIS is in this Subcommittee, and it is right now, while the hearing record remains open. We need thousands of letters from across the country, from livestock producers, main-street businesses and consumers, to be faxed to the Subcommittee before March 20, 2009, the date the hearing record closes. Below is a template letter you can use to fax your letter to the Subcommittee. Feel free to use all or part of this letter, or write one on your own. The important thing is we must literally have thousands of letters from all across the country faxed in before March 20. This is URGENT if you want to put a stop to NAIS. Please circulate this alert and the template letter to any e-mail or fax list you may have in order to blanket the country. There are about 3,000 R-CALF USA members that receive this alert. This is so important that we are asking every R-CALF USA member to deliver a copy of this alert to at least one non-member to get them to also fax a letter to the Subcommittee. Here is the Subcommittee's Fax Number for faxing your personal letter: 202-225-4544. Timing is everything. Please help us get thousands of personal letters from livestock producers, main-street businesses and consumers faxed to the Subcommittee before March 20. Good Luck! I cannot add the letter here as text is too long. If you wish to read or send the letter, I will e-mail to you via your request. edit, AMEN, KB! I was hoping for more interest in this subject as it IS important to any one that owns animals. Thanks to all who answered, keep alert to this and God Bless.

help i have no idea wat this means some body explain in short text 10 points best answer in plain explantion? Overview Instant messaging (IM) and chat are technologies that facilitate near real-time text based communication between two or more participants over a network. It is important to understand that what separates chat and instant messaging from technologies such as e-mail is the perceived synchronicity of the communication by the user - Chat happens in real-time before your eyes. For this reason, some people consider communication via instant messaging to be less intrusive than communication via phone. However, some systems allow the sending of messages to people not currently logged on (offline messages), thus removing much of the difference between Instant Messaging and e-mail. Instant Messaging allows instantaneous communication between a number of parties simultaneously, by transmitting information quickly. Some IM systems allow users to use webcams and Microphone which made them more popular than others. Due to this feature users can have a real-time conversation. In addition IM has additional features such as: the immediate receipt of acknowledgment or reply, group chatting, conference services (including voice and video), conversation logging and file transfer. IM allows effective and efficient communication, featuring immediate receipt of acknowledgment or reply. In certain cases Instant Messaging involves additional features, which make it even more popular, i.e. to see the other party, e.g. by using web-cams, or to talk directly for free over the Internet. It is possible to save a conversation for later reference. Instant messages are typically logged in a local message history which closes the gap to the persistent nature of e-mails and facilitates quick exchange of information like URLs or document snippets (which can be unwieldy when communicated via telephone). [edit] History In early instant messaging programs each character appeared when it was typed. The UNIX "talk" command shown in these screenshots was popular in the 1980s and early 1990s.Instant messaging actually predates the Internet, first appearing on multi-user operating systems like CTSS and Multics[1] in the mid-1960s. Initially, many of these systems, such as CTSS'.SAVED, were used as notification systems for services like printing, but quickly were used to facilitate communication with other users logged in to the same machine. As networks developed, the protocols spread with the networks. Some of these used a peer-to-peer protocol (eg talk, ntalk and ytalk), while others required peers to connect to a server (see talker and IRC). During the Bulletin board system (BBS) phenomenon that peaked during the 1980s, some systems incorporated chat features which were similar to instant messaging; Freelancin'_Roundtable was one prime example. In the last half of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the Quantum Link online service for Commodore 64 computers offered user-to-user messages between currently connected customers which they called "On-Line Messages" (or OLM for short). Quantum Link's better known later incarnation, America Online, offers a similar product under the name "AOL Instant Messages" (AIM). While the Quantum Link service ran on a Commodore 64, using only the Commodore's PETSCII text-graphics, the screen was visually divided up into sections and OLMs would appear as a yellow bar saying "Message From:" and the name of the sender along with the message across the top of whatever the user was already doing, and presented a list of options for responding.[2] As such, it could be considered a sort of GUI, albeit much more primitive than the later Unix, Windows and Macintosh based GUI IM programs. OLMs were what Q-Link called "Plus Services" meaning they charged an extra per-minute fee on top of the monthly Q-Link access costs. Modern, Internet-wide, GUI-based messaging clients, as they are known today, began to take off in the mid 1990s with ICQ (1996) being the first, followed by AOL Instant Messenger (AOL Instant Messenger, 1997). AOL later acquired Mirabilis, the creators of ICQ. A few years later ICQ (by now owned by AOL) was awarded two patents for instant messaging by the U.S. patent office. Meanwhile, other companies developed their own applications (Excite, MSN, Ubique, and Yahoo), each with its own proprietary protocol and client; users therefore had to run multiple client applications if they wished to use more than one of these networks. In 1998 IBM released IBM Lotus Sametime, a product based on technology acquired when IBM bought Haifa-based Ubique and Lexington-based Databeam. In 2000, an open source application and open standards-based protocol called Jabber was launched. Jabber servers could act as gateways to other IM protocols, reducing the need to run multiple clients. Multi-protocol clients such as Digsby,Pidgin, Trillian, Adium and Miranda can use any of the popular IM protocols by using additional local libraries for each protocol. IBM Lotus Sametime's November 2007 release added IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway support for XMPP. Recently, many instant messaging services have begun to offer video conferencing features, Voice Over IP (VoIP) and web conferencing services. Web conferencing services integrate both video conferencing and instant messaging capabilities. Some newer instant messaging companies are offering desktop sharing, IP radio, and IPTV to the voice and video features. The term "instant messenger" is a service mark of Time Warner[3] and may not be used in software not affiliated with AOL in the United States. For this reason, the instant messaging client formerly known as Gaim or gaim announced in April 2007 that they would be renamed "Pidgin"[4]. [edit] Cooperation Standard free instant messaging applications offer functions like file transfer, contact lists, the ability to have similtaneous converstations etc. These may be all the functions that a small business needs but larger organisations will require more sophisticated applications that can work together. The solution to finding applications capable of this is to use enterprise versions of instant messaging applications. These include titles like Jabber, Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office Communicator, etc., which are often integrated with other enterprise applications such as workflow systems. These enterprise applications, or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), are built to certain constraints, namely storing data in a common format. There have been several attempts to create a unified standard for instant messaging: IETF's SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions), APEX (Application Exchange), Prim (Presence and Instant Messaging Protocol), the open XML-based XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), more commonly known as Jabber and OMA's (Open Mobile Alliance) IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence Service) created specifically for mobile devices. Most attempts at creating a unified standard for the major IM providers (AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft) have failed and each continues to use its own proprietary protocol. However, while discussions at IETF were stalled, Reuters head of collaboration services, David Gurle (the founder of Microsoft's Real Time Communication and Collaboration business), signed the first inter-service provider connectivity agreement on September 2003. This agreement enabled AIM, ICQ and MSN Messenger users to talk with Reuters Messaging counterparts and vice-versa against an access fee. Following this, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL came to a deal where Microsoft's Live Communication Server 2005 users would also have the possibility to talk to public instant messaging users. This deal established SIP/SIMPLE as a standard for protocol interoperability and established a connectivity fee for accessing public instant messaging clouds. Separately, on October 13, 2005 Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that by (the Northern Hemisphere) summer of 2006 they would interoperate using SIP/SIMPLE which is followed on December 2005 by the AOL and Google strategic partnership deal where Google Talk users would be able to talk with AIM and ICQ users provided they have an identity at AOL. There are two ways to combine the many disparate protocols: One way is to combine the many disparate protocols inside the IM client application. The other way is to combine the many disparate protocols inside the IM server application. This approach moves the task of communicating to the other services to the server. Clients need not know or care about other IM protocols. For example, LCS 2005 Public IM Connectivity. This approach is popular in Jabber/XMPP servers however the so-called transport projects suffer the same reverse engineering difficulties as any other project involved with closed protocols or formats. Some approaches, such as that adopted by the Sonork enterprise IM software or the Jabber/XMPP network or Winpopup LAN Messenger, allow organizations to create their own private instant messaging network by enabling them to limit access to the server (often with the IM network entirely behind their firewall) and administer user permissions. Other corporate messaging systems allow registered users to also connect from outside the corporation LAN, by using a secure firewall-friendly HTTPS based protocol. Typically, a dedicated corporate IM server has several advantages such as pre-populated contact lists, integrated authentication, and better security and privacy. Some networks have made changes to prevent them from being utilized by such multi-network IM clients. For example, Trillian had to release several revisions and patches to allow its users to access the MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! networks, after changes were made to these networks. The major IM providers typically cite the need for formal agreements as well as security concerns as reasons for making these changes. [edit] Mobile Instant Messaging Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) is a presence enabled messaging service that aims to transpose the desktop messaging experience to the usage scenario of being on the move. While several of the core ideas of the desktop experience on one hand apply to a connected mobile device, others do not: Users usually only look at their phone's screen — presence status changes might occur under different circumstances as happens at the desktop, and several functional limits exist based on the fact that the vast majority of mobile communication devices are chosen by their users to fit into the palm of their hand. Some of the form factor and mobility related differences need to be taken into account in order to create a really adequate, powerful and yet convenient mobile experience: radio bandwidth, memory size, availability of media formats, keypad based input, screen output, CPU performance and battery power are core issues that desktop device users and even nomadic users with connected network. [edit] Friend-to-friend networks Instant Messaging may be done in a Friend-to-friend network, in which each node connects to the friends on the friendslist. This allows for communication with friends of friends and for the building of chatrooms for instant messages with all friends on that network. Emotions are often expressed in shorthand. For example; lol. But a movement is currently underway to be more accurate with the emotional expression. Real time reactions such as (chortle) (snort) (guffaw) or (eye-roll) are rapidly taking the place of acronyms.[citation needed] [edit] Business application Instant messaging has proven to be similar to personal computers, e-mail, and the WWW, in that its adoption for use as a business communications medium was driven primarily by individual employees using consumer software at work, rather than by formal mandate or provisioning by corporate information technology departments. Tens of millions of the consumer IM accounts in use are being used for business purposes by employees of companies and other organizations. In response to the demand for business-grade IM and the need to ensure security and legal compliance, a new type of instant messaging, called "Enterprise Instant Messaging" ("EIM") was created when Lotus Software launched IBM Lotus Sametime in 1998. Microsoft followed suit shortly thereafter with Microsoft Exchange Instant Messaging, later created a new platform called Microsoft Office Live Communications Server, and released Office Communications Server 2007 in October 2007. Both IBM Lotus and Microsoft have introduced federation between their EIM systems and some of the public IM networks so that employees may use a single interface to both their internal EIM system and their contacts on AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!. Current leading EIM platforms include IBM Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Jabber XCP. In addition, industry-focused EIM platforms such as IMtrader from Pivot Incorporated, Reuters Messaging, and Bloomberg Messaging provide enhanced IM capabilities to financial services companies. The adoption of IM across corporate networks outside of the control of IT organizations creates risks and liabilities for companies who do not effectively manage and support IM use. Companies implement specialized IM archiving and security products and services like those from Secure Computing, Akonix, SurfControl, and ScanSafe to mitigate these risks and provide safe, secure, productive instant messaging capabilities to their employees. [edit] Practical Use in Enterprise The popular embrace of IM technology for sharing information has quickly led to organizations adopting IM solutions for the perceived advantages that can be brought by it. As organizations are becoming more information based (McNurlin & Sprague, 2006, p.499) the need for effective knowledge sharing, team working and collaborative environments amongst employees has become vital, especially within more geographically dispersed teams. Typically IM conversations tend to have a certain "character", they are often short and only cover one topic. Media-switching and multitasking are common throughout, however IM might also be used between established coworkers and friends for longer, more intermittent conversation. In their report of IM use at the workplace Nardi et al. (2000) identifies the four primary functions of IM which are often cited in other reports, These primary functions are: Quick Questions and Clarifications Coordinating and scheduling tasks Coordinating impromptu social meetings Keeping in touch with friends and family IM is perhaps best suited to "Quick Questions and Clarifications" as this is the most often mentioned attribute in other reports. A user can "respond rapidly without the overhead of telephone or FTF interaction. For example, IDC reports, "Users see IM as a medium for quick, semi-permanent ‘flashes’ that beg a near-immediate response" (Isaacs et al., 2002). Nardi's second and third observations are enabled in part due to the "Presence Awareness" feature of IM clients in which the user knows who is "available". This is the most relevant for colleagues who share the same physical space as each other and even paves the way for other mediums to take up the task of communication e.g. F2F or Phone. The implication is that viable communication of any sort can in someway be encouraged through IM's "Presence Awareness" feature. (Issacs et al, 2002) supports this view, "IM in business might not be the main tool for of communication, it could just be the meeting point for another type of media e.g. conference calls. Nardi's third and fourth observations focus on the social use of IM, which have also been widely publicized in other report. That IM is used for keeping in touch with friends and arranging social events has led some employers to believe that it is used primarily for this purpose. According to (Issacs et al, 2002) a market study found that "'Fear of losing employee productivity’ was the greatest concern of businesses in regards to instant messaging". The study by (Issacs et al, 2002) goes on to suggest this fear is unfounded as it was found that on average "only 13% of conversations contained personal topics", and "only 6.4% were exclusively personal". [edit] Review of Products "IM solutions can typically be catagorised into two types: Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) and Consumer Instant Mesaging (CIM). Enterprise solutions use an internal IM server, however this isn't always feasible, particularly for smaller businesses with limited budgets. The second option, using a (CIM) provides the advantage of being inexpensive to implement and has little need for investing in new hardware or server software. However, in recent years open source IM clients such as Jabber have emerged that provide free EIM grade solutions. (Wikipedia,. 2008) For corporate use encryption and conversation archiving are usually regarded as important features due to security concerns. Sometimes the use of different operating systems in organizations calls for the use of software that supports more than one platform. For example many software companies use Windows XP in administration departments but have software developers who use Linux. Most people have had experience of using online chat and messaging over the internet whether it is with Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger, Skype or e-mail. One form of chat and messaging currently popular is Bebo. It is a non-corporate form of messaging which allows its user to create and maintain a social network. Libraries use chat applications and Morris Messenger is an application commonly used by them. This is a power based instant messenger, which uses Perl, SQL, and small Java. It accepts input from both staff and regular customers and saves important information in an SQL database built for the system. [edit] Risks and liabilities Although instant messaging delivers many benefits, it also carries with it certain risks and liabilities, particularly when used in workplaces. Among these risks and liabilities are: Security risks (e.g. IM used to infect computers with spyware, viruses, trojans, worms) Compliance risks Inappropriate use Intellectual property leakage Crackers (malicious "hacker" or black hat hacker) have consistently used IM networks as vectors for delivering phishing attempts, "poison URL's", and virus-laden file attachments from 2004 to the present, with over 1100 discrete attacks listed by the IM Security Center[5] in 2004-2007. Hackers use two methods of delivering malicious code through IM: delivery of virus, trojan, or spyware within an infected file, and the use of "socially engineered" text with a web address that entices the recipient to click on a URL that connects him or her to a website that then downloads malicious code. Viruses, worms, and trojans typically propagate by sending themselves rapidly through the infected user's buddy list. An effective attack using a poison URL may reach tens of thousands of people in minutes when each person's buddy list receives messages appearing to be from a trusted friend. The recipients click on the web address, and the entire cycle starts again. Infections may range from nuisance to criminal, and are becoming more sophisticated each year. In addition to the malicious code threat, the use of instant messaging at work also creates a risk of non-compliance to laws and regulations governing the use of electronic communications in businesses. In the United States alone there are over 10,000 laws and regulations related to electronic messaging and records retention.[6] The more well-known of these include the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, and SEC 17a-3. Clarification from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ("FINRA") was issued to member firms in the financial services industry in December, 2007, noting that "electronic communications", "email", and "electronic correspondence" may be used interchangeably and can include such forms of electronic messaging as instant messaging and text messaging.[7] Changes to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, effective December 1, 2006, created a new category for electronic records which may be requested during discovery (law) in legal proceedings. Most countries around the world also regulate the use of electronic messaging and electronic records retention in similar fashion to the United States. The most common regulations related to IM at work involve the need to produce archived business communications to satisfy government or judicial requests under law. Many instant messaging communications fall into the category of business communications that must be archived and retrievable. Organizations of all types must protect themselves from the liability of their employees' inappropriate use of IM. The informal, immediate, and ostensibly anonymous nature of instant messaging makes it a candidate for abuse in the workplace. The topic of inappropriate IM use became front page news in October 2006 when Congressman Mark Foley resigned his seat after admitting sending offensive instant messages of a sexual nature to underage former House pages from his Congressional office PC. The Mark Foley Scandal led to media coverage and mainstream newspaper articles warning of the risks of inappropriate IM use in workplaces. In most countries, corporations have a legal responsibility to ensure harassment-free work environment for employees. The use of corporate-owned computers, networks, and software to harass an individual or spread inappropriate jokes or language creates a liability for not only the offender but also the employer. A survey by IM archiving and security provider Akonix Systems, Inc. in March 2007 showed that 31% of respondents had been harassed over IM at work.[8] Companies now include instant messaging as an integral component of their policies on appropriate use of the World Wide Web, e-mail, and other corporate assets. Within the company there is also the risk of employees using instant messaging to release confidential information and project details to an outside source. This issue is best controlled by a combination of written policy and technology. An organization's policies on use of IM in the workplace should be an integral part of the overall computing and network use policies, and should be published and communicated at least annually. In addition to written policy, organizations should implement "gateways" or IM security products to monitor content of inbound and outbound messages. Products from IM security providers (See section on IM security) typically allow administrators to set alerts and enforce policy (i.e. allow or block messages) based on keywords and regular expressions within instant messages. Employees may also misuse IM to communicate on a personal level with friends and family. This is poor use of a business’s time and resources, as the employee’s effectiveness will most certainly decrease due to the added distractions. (Licari, J., May 2005). Businesses often use IM security products to monitor and archive IM conversations for the purpose of minimizing this type of productivity drain. [edit] Security and archiving In the early 2000s, a new class of IT security provider emerged to provide remedies for the risks and liabilities faced by corporations who chose to use IM for business communications. The IM security providers created new products to be installed in corporate networks for the purpose of archiving, content-scanning, and security-scanning IM traffic moving in and out of the corporation. Similar to the e-mail filtering vendors, the IM security providers focus on the risks and liabilities described above. With rapid adoption of IM in the workplace, demand for IM security products began to grow in the mid-2000s. By 2007, the preferred platform for the purchase of security software had become the "appliance", according to IDC, who estimate that by 2008, 80% of network security products will be delivered via an appliance.[9] [edit] User base Note that many of the numbers listed in this section are not directly comparable, and some are speculative. Some instant messaging systems are distributed among many different instances and thus difficult to measure in total (e.g. Jabber). While some numbers are given by the owners of a complete instant messaging system, others are provided by commercial vendors of a part of a distributed system. Some companies may be motivated to inflate their numbers in order to increase advertisement earnings or to attract partners, clients, or customers. Importantly, some numbers are reported as the number of "active" users (without a shared standard of that activity), others indicate total user accounts, while others indicate only the users logged in during an instance of peak usage. Service User count Date/source AIM 53 million active September 2006 >100 million total January 2006 Jabber 40-50 million total January 2007, based on calculations of Jabber Inc 90 million total Based on calculations of Process-One: Process-One uses ejabberd as Jabber server software. If it is assumed that ejabberd has a 40% market share amongst public and private open source server deployments, there are 50 million users using open source servers. With Jabber Inc's numbers, this adds up to the 90 million number stated here. eBuddy 35 million total October 2006, including 4 million mobile users Windows Live Messenger 294 million active worldwide November 2007 Yahoo! Messenger 22 million total September 2006 QQ 20 million peak online (majority in China) 3 June 2006 221 million "active" (majority in China) 3 June 2006 IBM Lotus Sametime 17 million total (private, in enterprises) November 2007 ICQ 15 million active July 2006 Skype 12 million peak online February 2008 309 million total April 2008 Xfire 10 million total May 2008 MXit 7 million total (>560,000 outside of South Africa) 10 August 2007. Note that these users are part of the Jabber user base as MXit federates with the Jabber network. Gadu-Gadu 5.6 million total June 2006 Paltalk 3.3 million unique visitors per month August 2006 IMVU 1 million total June 2007 Mail.ru Agent 1 million active (daily) September 2006 Meebo 1 million total October 2006 PSYC 1 million active (daily) (majority in Brazil) February 2007. Total count cannot be accurately estimated due to the decentralized nature of the protocol. VZOchat >200,000 October 2007 [edit] IM Language Users sometimes make use of internet slang or text speak to abbreviate common words or expressions in order to quicken conversations or to reduce keystrokes. [edit] See also Comparison of instant messaging clients Comparison of instant messaging protocols Instant messaging manager LAN messenger Text messaging it is a question

Who wants some free film (B&W and Color)? I have about 4, maybe as many as 7 rolls of black & white film left over from a photography course I took last year. Some of the rolls expire in November 2007, others in March 2008. The film is good quality (not professional grade) Ilford HP5, ISO 400, 36 exposures. See info about the film here: http://www.ilfordphoto.com/products/product.asp?n=7&t=Consumer+%26+Professional+Films I'm no longer taking many film photographs (I've gone digital), and doubt I'll use these rolls before they expire. I have a bunch of leftover Kodak color film I'll throw in as well (24 exposures, different speeds). I'm willing to send it to someone at no charge, I just need a shipping address. If you don't want to give your home address, I'll ship to a mail drop location. Please don't list your address here, e-mail me through the profile interface. I hate to see all the film go to waste. I'll give top preference to a photography student, then a hobbyist. Serious requests only. Carla, still waiting for your contact info. Hey, wickedremy, try responding on the right question.

Is this credit card a good choice for me...? I have bad credit... or none, i cant get approved for anything else and dont understand all the red tape! HELP! does anyone have this card? THE ORCHARD BANK CREDIT CARD 200 min security deposit 35 dollar annual fee Variable Rate Information Your APRs may vary. The rates are determined monthly by adding the Index (described below) and: 6.65% ("Spread") for the Customary APR for credit card purchases. 16.90% ("Spread") for the Cash APR for cash advances, including balance transfers, if applicable, and cash advances made by credit card check. 22.24% ("Spread") for the Default APR. For each billing cycle, the Index is determined in the month prior to the month in which the billing cycle ends. In that prior month, the highest (U.S.) "Prime Rate" published in the Money Rates Table of The Wall Street Journal is selected (the "Index"). If the Index has changed, the new variable rates will take effect with the billing cycle that ends on or after the first day of the month following the Index change. Grace Period for Repayment of Balances for Purchases You have 25 days from the date of the periodic statement to avoid a Finance Charge on new credit card purchases, provided you paid your previous balance in full. Method of Computing Balance for Purchases Average Daily Balance (including new purchases). Annual Fee $35 per year Minimum Finance Charge $1.00 for each billing cycle in which a Periodic Finance Charge is payable. Foreign Transaction Fee Finance Charge 1% of the U.S. dollar amount will apply to transactions made in a foreign currency. Cash Advance Fee:$5 or 5% on all cash advances, whichever is greater; unless otherwise disclosed. Finance Charges accrue from the date of transaction. Cash advances will be limited. Your cash advance limit is disclosed on your billing statement. Late Payment Fee: The Late Payment Fee will vary based on the amount of your outstanding balance on your Payment Due Date, and will be: $30 if your balance is more than $0 up to and including $1000; or $35 if your balance is greater than $1000. Overlimit Fee: $30. Accessing the full amount or most of your available credit may result in an overlimit fee. Credit Limit Increase (CLI) Fee: If requested and approved, a CLI fee of up to $50% of the CLI may be charged to your Account, depending on your creditworthiness. Closed Account Service Fee: $3.50 per month on closed accounts with a debit balance. The variable Customary APR will apply to credit card purchases. The variable Cash APR will apply to cash advances, including balance transfers, if available, and cash advances made by credit card check. If at any time your Account is subject to the Customary and/or Cash APRs, and you fail to make at least your Minimum Payment in time to be credited to your Account by the Payment Due Date, or your Account exceeds your credit limit, your entire Account balance will increase to the Default APR. Note: The Orchard Bank Secured MasterCard requires a minimum deposit of $200 for a minimum $200 line of credit. For more information on the Orchard Bank Secured MasterCard, see our Secured Card FAQs. At our discretion, payments are generally applied to interest, fees, and then principal balances. We apply your payments to lower APR balances before higher APR balances. The application of payments is subject to change at any time, without notice. IMPORTANT INFORMATION There is a maximum of two (2) Accounts issued by HSBC Bank Nevada, N.A. per customer. If within 90 days of your Account open date, you decide you do not want the account, you can call the customer service number provided on the back of your card to cancel. Any fees, if assessed, will be reversed at no cost to you if you have not used the card. IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT PROCEDURES FOR OPENING A NEW ACCOUNT To help the government fight the funding of terrorism and money laundering activities, Federal law requires all financial institutions to obtain, verify, and record information that identifies each person who opens an Account. What this means for you: When you open an Account, we will ask you for your name, address, date of birth, and other information that will allow us to identify you. We may also ask to see your driver's license or other identifying documents. Notice to California Residents: Except otherwise limited by applicable law, we may provide credit information about your account to our affiliates from time to time. This information may be used to qualify you for other credit offers. Married persons may apply for a separate account. Notice to New York Residents: Consumer reports may be requested in connection with the processing of this application and any resulting account. Upon your request, we will inform you of the names and addresses of any consumer reporting agencies which have provided us with such reports. Notice to Ohio Residents: The Ohio laws against discrimination require that all creditors make credit equally available to all creditworthy customers, and that credit reporting agencies maintain separate credit histories on each individual upon request. The Ohio Civil Rights Commission administers compliance with the law. Notice to Married Wisconsin Residents: No agreement, court order, or individual statement applying to marital property will adversely affect a creditor's interests unless prior to the time credit is granted the creditor is furnished with a copy of the agreement, court order, or statement, or has actual knowledge of the adverse provision. You must indicate your marital status for this application to be processed. INTEREST RATES AND FINANCE CHARGES Interest Rates The APRs on your Account are variable rates and are determined by adding a specified amount ("Spread") to an Index (described below). The APR is divided by 365 and rounded to the next highest hundred thousandth of a percentage point to determine your Daily Periodic Rate. The Daily Periodic Rate is used to determine the amount of Periodic Finance Charges (see Finance Charges). Monthly Index For each billing cycle, the Index is determined in the month prior to the month in which the billing cycle ends. In that prior month, the highest (U.S.) "Prime Rate" published in the Money Rates table of The Wall Street Journal is selected (the "Index"). If the Index has changed, the new variable rates will take effect with the billing cycle that ends on or after the first day of the month following the Index change. An increase in the Index will increase your applicable Daily Periodic Rates which may increase the Finance Charge due on your Account and may increase the Minimum Payment and Current Payment Due. Each time any APR changes, we will apply it to any existing balances, excluding any fixed rate Promotional or Introductory APR. Purchase APR Your variable Customary APR applies to credit card purchases. The Daily Periodic Rate is based on 1/365th of the Index plus 6.65% ("Spread"). For example, for billing cycles ending 5/17/07, the rate of FINANCE CHARGE would have been a Daily Periodic Rate of .04082% (corresponding 14.90% ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE). The minimum rate of FINANCE CHARGE is a Daily Periodic Rate of .04082% (corresponding 14.90% ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE). Cash APR Your variable Cash APR applies to cash advances, including balance transfers, if available, and cash advances made by credit card check. The Daily Periodic Rate is based on 1/365th of the Index plus 16.90% ("Spread"). For example, for billing cycles ending 5/17/07, the rate of FINANCE CHARGE would have been a Daily Periodic Rate of .06890% (corresponding 25.15% ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE). The minimum rate of FINANCE CHARGE is a Daily Periodic Rate of .05726% (corresponding 20.90% ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE). If at any time your Account is subject to the Customary and/or Cash APRs, and you fail to make at least your Minimum Payment in time to be credited to your Account by the Payment Due Date, or your Account exceeds your credit limit, your entire Account balance will increase to the variable Default APR. At our discretion, your Account may return to the Customary APR after five consecutive months of on-time payments of at least the Current Payment Due, without exceeding your credit limit. Default APR The Daily Periodic Rate for the variable Default APR is based on 1/365th of the Index plus 22.24% ("Spread"). For example, for billing cycles ending 5/17/07, the rate of FINANCE CHARGE would have been a Daily Periodic Rate of .08353% (corresponding 30.49% ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE). The minimum rate of FINANCE CHARGE is a Daily Periodic Rate of .08079% (corresponding 29.49% ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE). Finance Charges Finance Charges are the total of the greater of (a) Minimum Finance Charge, or (b) periodic Finance Charges, and any applicable (c) Cash Advance Fee Finance Charges, (d) Foreign Transaction Fee Finance Charge, (e) Credit Limit Increase Fee Finance Charge, (f) Closed Account Service Fee Finance Charges, and (g) Processing Fee Finance Charge. (a) Minimum Finance Charge. A Finance Charge that is assessed in lieu of a lesser periodic Finance Charge in any billing cycle in which a periodic Finance Charge is payable. This fee is $1.00. (b) Periodic Finance Charges. Periodic Finance Charges are computed by multiplying the Average Daily Balance for each category of transactions shown on your statement (e.g., purchases, balance transfers, cash advances) by the applicable Daily Periodic Rate and then multiplying the result by the number of days in the billing cycle. To calculate the Daily Balances, we take the beginning debit balance for each category of transactions each day, add any new transactions, any previous day's periodic Finance Charges, any assessed fees and charges, and subtract any payments and/or credits. If a debit transaction posts after the beginning of your billing cycle, but the transaction occurred prior to the beginning of your billing cycle, the applicable Daily Balance will be adjusted to include the transaction amount and any previous day's periodic Finance Charges for each day the transaction amount was outstanding prior to the beginning of the current billing cycle. Then, for each transaction category, we add the Daily Balances for the billing cycle together and divide the total by the number of days in the billing cycle. This is the Average Daily Balance for each transaction category. (1) Credit Card Purchases. Periodic Finance Charges begin to accrue on the date of the transaction and continue to accrue until payment in full is credited to your Account. However, there is a 25 day Grace Period on new credit card purchases. That means, if the New Balance shown on your last statement is paid in full by the Payment Due Date for that statement, periodic Finance Charges will not be imposed on new credit card purchases, provided the New Balance for the current billing cycle is paid in full by the Payment Due Date for that billing cycle. If, however, the New Balance is not paid in full by the Payment Due Date for the immediately preceding billing cycle, periodic Finance Charges will be incurred on new credit card purchases (i.e., purchases appearing for the first time in the current cycle) from the date of the transaction and on the previously billed but unpaid credit card purchases form the first day of the current cycle. (2) Cash Advances (including balance transfer and credit card checks). Periodic Finance Charges begin to accrue on the date of the transaction and continue to accrue until payment in full is credited to your Account. There is no Grace Period on cash advances. Periodic Finance Charges will be calculated using the Daily Periodic Rate in effect on the statement closing date. (c) Cash Advance Fee Finance Charges. Cash advances include all advances to get cash over the counter, through an ATM, balance transfers (if available), credit card checks, or other "cash-like" transactions (such as purchasing a money order, traveler's check, casino or betting chip, or a lottery ticket) as determined by us. A Finance Charge will be computed on the amount of each cash advance as of the date of the transaction. The Cash Advance Fee FINANCE CHARGE for all cash advances is 5%, subject to a minimum FINANCE CHARGE of $5, unless otherwise disclosed. (d) Foreign Transaction Fee Finance Charge. A Foreign Transaction Fee FINANCE CHARGE equal to 1% of the U.S. dollar amount is assessed on transactions made in a foreign currency, as of the transaction date. (e) Credit Limit Increase Fee Finance Charge. If you request and are approved for a credit limit increase ("CLI"), a CLI Fee FINANCE CHARGE of up to 50% of the CLI may be assessed to your Account, depending on your creditworthiness. (f) Closed Account Service Fee Finance Charge. A $3.50 per month FINANCE CHARGE is assessed to the Account for each billing cycle whenever that Account is closed with a debit balance. The application of any Finance Charge other than a periodic Finance Charge may cause the APR on the billing statement on which this Finance Charge first appears to exceed the Nominal APR. ACCOUNT FEES Annual Fee/Periodic Membership Fee Your Account is subject to a $35 Annual Fee for each year your Account is open or closed with a balance. If you close your Account within the first 90 days your Account is open, the Annual Fee is refundable so long as you have not used the Account. Late Payment Fee A Late Payment Fee is assessed for each billing cycle in which at least the Minimum Payment, and any amount past due, is not paid in time to be credited to the Account by the Payment Due Date. The Late Payment Fee will vary based on the amount of your outstanding balance on your Payment Due Date, or during the period up to 5 days after your Payment Due Date, as determined by us, and will be: $30 if your balance is more than $0 up to and including $1000; or $35 if your balance is greater than $1000. Overlimit Fee An Overlimit Fee is assessed if your Account balance exceeds the applicable credit limit at any time during a billing cycle. We may impose this fee even if we authorize or impose any charges that cause your balance to exceed the credit limit. This fee is $30. Other Fees and Charges Returned Payment Fee A Returned Payment Fee is assessed to your Account each time a payment check, automatic payment deduction, or other payment method is not honored or is returned unsatisfied by the bank or other financial institution. Any payment returned unsatisfied for any reason may be reposted to any type of transaction (i.e. cash advance, purchases, etc.) and Finance Charges may be reinstated back to the payment date at the APR being charged for that transaction. This fee is $30. Returned Check Fee A Returned Check Fee is assessed to the Account each time a credit card check, balance transfer check (if available), electronic check or other Account access device is returned unsatisfied by us for any reason. This fee is $30. Check by Phone A Check by Phone Fee may be assessed to the Account each time a payment is made by telephone, even if the payment is made by someone other than you. The amount of this fee will be disclosed at the time such payment is requested. Stop Payment Fee A Stop Payment Fee is added to the cash advance balance when a payment of a credit card check is stopped at your request. Payment may be stopped on a credit card check by notifying us in writing or by calling us at the telephone number listed on the Account billing statement, so long as such check has not already been processed. A stop payment request must include the check number, payee, amount and date of the credit card check on which payment is to be stopped. If a stop payment is requested by telephone, the call must be confirmed in writing within 14 days. A written stop payment will remain in effect for six months unless renewed in writing. This fee is $29. Send stop payment requests to P.O. Box 81622, Salinas, CA 93912-1622. Research Fee A $7 Research Fee is assessed to the Account for each sales slip copy, $3 for each statement copy, and $10 for each application copy upon request. ADDITIONAL TERMS Arbitration The Cardmember Agreement and Disclosure Statement ("Agreement") that you will receive with your card, if you are approved for credit, provides that certain disputes are subject to binding arbitration. Arbitration replaces the right to go to court, including the right to a jury and the right to participate in a class action or similar proceeding. Please read the "Arbitration" section of the Agreement carefully. YOUR BILLING RIGHTS What To Do If There's An Error In Your Bill YOUR BILLING RIGHTS - KEEP THIS NOTICE FOR FUTURE USE This notice contains important information about your rights and our responsibilities under the Fair Credit Billing Act. NOTIFY US IN CASE OF ERRORS OR QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR BILL If you think your bill is wrong, or if you need more information about a transaction on your bill, write to us (on a separate sheet) at the address listed on your billing statement. Write us as soon as possible. We must hear from you no later than 60 days after we sent you the first bill on which the error or problem appeared. You can telephone us, but doing so will not preserve your rights. Please include the following information in your letter: Your name, account number and signature; The dollar amount of the suspected error; and Describe the error and explain, if you can, why you believe there is an error. If you need more information, describe the item you are not sure about. If you have authorized us to pay your Account bill automatically from your savings or checking account, you can stop the payment on any amount you think is wrong. To stop the payment, your letter must reach us three business days before the automatic payment is scheduled to occur. YOUR RIGHTS AND OUR RESPONSIBILITIES AFTER WE RECEIVE YOUR WRITTEN NOTICE: We must acknowledge your letter within 30 days, unless we have corrected the error by then. Within 90 days, we must either correct the error or explain why we believe the bill was correct. After we receive your letter, we cannot try to collect any amount you question, or report you as delinquent. We can continue to bill you for the amount you question, including Finance Charges, and we can apply any unpaid amount against your Credit Limit. You do not have to pay any questioned amount while we are investigating, but you are still obligated to pay the parts of your bill that are not in question. If we find that we made a mistake on your bill, you will not have to pay any Finance Charges related to any questioned amount. If we didn't make a mistake, you may have to pay Finance Charges, and you will have to make up any missed payments on the questioned amount. In either case, we will send you a statement of the amount you owe and the date it is due. If you fail to pay the amount we think you owe, we may report you as delinquent. However, if our explanation does not satisfy you, and you write to us within ten days telling us you still refuse to pay, we must tell anyone we report you to that you have a question about your bill. And, we must tell you the name of anyone we reported you to. Upon settlement of the dispute, we must tell everyone we report you to that the matter has been settled. If we don't follow these rules, we can't collect the first $50 of the questioned amount, even if your bill was correct. SPECIAL RULES FOR CREDIT CARD PURCHASES If you have a problem with the quality of property or services you purchased with a credit card, and you have tried in good faith to correct the problem with the merchant, you may have the right not to pay the remaining amount due on the property or services. There are two limitations on this right: (a) You must have made the purchase in your home state or if not, within 100 miles of your current mailing address. (b) The purchase price must have been more than $50. These limitations do not apply if we own or operate the merchant, or if we mailed you the advertisement for the property or services. HSBC Card Services Inc. and/or HSBC Card Services (II) Inc. provide processing services for HSBC Bank Nevada, N.A. You may write to us at the address shown on your billing statement or HSBC Bank Nevada, N.A., 1111 Town Center Drive, Las Vegas, Nevada 89144. Orchard Bank, Household MasterCard and HSBC credit cards are issued by HSBC Bank Nevada, N.A. in Las Vegas, Nevada and serviced by its affiliates HSBC Card Services Inc. and/or HSBC Card Services (II) Inc. Not available to those consumers residing outside the United States. Offer void for all existing Household Bank and Orchard Bank MasterCard Cardmembers. Important Information To receive, view, and save disclosures and Account Information electronically, you must have a personal computer equipped with Netscape 4.0, Microsoft Explorer 4.0 or AOL 5.0 or later, and either a printer, a hard drive, or other storage device. You must also have a valid email address. As paperless communication options become available, our cardholders will be able to choose which communications to receive electronically, and which to receive via standard mail. We will notify you in advance of sending such electronic disclosures and Account Information. You must notify us if your email address changes in order to continue receiving disclosures and Account Information electronically. You may withdraw your consent to receive disclosures and Account Information electronically at any time. However, if you withdraw your consent, future disclosures and Account Information will be sent via U.S. mail. You have the option to request any information that we have provided electronically in paper form. To notify us of your new email address, withdraw your consent, or to request a disclosure or Account Information in paper form, please contact us by calling the phone number on the back of your credit card or write us at Bankcard Services, P.O. Box 80084, Salinas, CA 93912-0084. Electronic Agreement: I agree to receive disclosures and other Account Information electronically. I confirm that I have the software and computer equipment that satisfies the requirement above and that I will download or print the disclosures and other card related communications for my records. Additionally, by clicking the YES button, I acknowledge that I am providing my consent to receive electronic communications Terms and ConditionsAnnual Percentage Rate (APR) for Purchases Variable Customary APR: 14.90%1 will apply. Minimum Customary APR: 14.90% Other APR's Variable Cash APR: 25.15%2 (Minimum Cash APR: 20.90%) Variable Default APR: 30.49% (Minimum Default APR: 29.49%) Variable Rate Information Your APRs may vary. The rates are determined

Did you know barrera-autosales is scam site like stars-automart.com? Look at barrera-autosales.com, autoaven,com and stars-auto.com they have made some changes to the web page but it is still a scam site quote Denver News BBB Flooded With Complaints On 2 Auto Auction Sites Stars-Automart, Autoaven Sent Cease And Desist Letters POSTED: 12:41 pm MDT August 11, 2009 DENVER -- The Denver office of the Better Business Bureau said its telephone helpline has been jammed with calls from people across the country who are asking about two auto sales Web sites that claim to be headquartered in Denver. According to the BBB, calls have been nonstop and the BBB has sent a "cease and desist" notice regarding trademark infringement to the company because of a fake BBB report the sites link to that falsely shows the company with an A+ rating. The two Web sites list one physical address as 10701 W. Sixth Ave, but that address actually belongs to BBB Accredited business, Automotive Avenues, Inc. Another link goes to 3925 Monaco Parkway, which actually belongs to Cintas Document Management -- a paper shredding company. The two Web sites, www.stars-automart.com and www.autoaven.com, claim to offer sales of repossessed vehicles. The BBB said customers complain that once a majority payment is sent via MoneyGram to a Denver address, the company ceases communication. The company has not responded to the BBB. An Internet check shows the two domain names are registered to a private registration company in Sunnyvale, Calif. The BBB said it sent out the warning because on-delivery and Internet auction fraud were the top two complained-about fraud types at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. "The BBB takes complaints very seriously and does not want any more consumers to be victimized," a news release stated. TheDenverChannel attempted to contact the Web sites without success. The phone number listed on the site goes to a recording, which suggests callers contact them by e-mail. The same section of the stars-automart.com Web site lists a James Stewart as the owner. To protect from online scams, the BBB has the following suggestions: • Verify any organization credentials with the organization directly, (BBB, AutoTrader, Consumer Reports logos, etc.) • Check the company’s BBB report at www.denver.bbb.org or by calling 303-758-2100. Only do business online with websites you are familiar with and that have a positive track record. • Make sure the website has a privacy policy. It will contain agreements on how the information you provide on the website will be used and kept private and secure. Print this and keep it in your records. • The privacy policy may also contain the company’s mailing address. Only do business with companies that provide a sure method of contact, should something go wrong. • Do not wire transfer any payment. Wired funds cannot be traced and therefore cannot be recovered if you are a victim of fraud. • If you have become a victim of fraud, contact your BBB and the Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov to file a complaint. Please dont fall for this and report them to law enforcement

Who knew that barrera-autosales.com, autoaven,com and stars-auto.com are the same scamers? Look at barrera-autosales.com, autoaven,com and stars-auto.com they have made some changes to the web page but it is still a scam site quote Denver News BBB Flooded With Complaints On 2 Auto Auction Sites Stars-Automart, Autoaven Sent Cease And Desist Letters POSTED: 12:41 pm MDT August 11, 2009 DENVER -- The Denver office of the Better Business Bureau said its telephone helpline has been jammed with calls from people across the country who are asking about two auto sales Web sites that claim to be headquartered in Denver. According to the BBB, calls have been nonstop and the BBB has sent a "cease and desist" notice regarding trademark infringement to the company because of a fake BBB report the sites link to that falsely shows the company with an A+ rating. The two Web sites list one physical address as 10701 W. Sixth Ave, but that address actually belongs to BBB Accredited business, Automotive Avenues, Inc. Another link goes to 3925 Monaco Parkway, which actually belongs to Cintas Document Management -- a paper shredding company. The two Web sites, www.stars-automart.com and www.autoaven.com, claim to offer sales of repossessed vehicles. The BBB said customers complain that once a majority payment is sent via MoneyGram to a Denver address, the company ceases communication. The company has not responded to the BBB. An Internet check shows the two domain names are registered to a private registration company in Sunnyvale, Calif. The BBB said it sent out the warning because on-delivery and Internet auction fraud were the top two complained-about fraud types at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. "The BBB takes complaints very seriously and does not want any more consumers to be victimized," a news release stated. TheDenverChannel attempted to contact the Web sites without success. The phone number listed on the site goes to a recording, which suggests callers contact them by e-mail. The same section of the stars-automart.com Web site lists a James Stewart as the owner. To protect from online scams, the BBB has the following suggestions: • Verify any organization credentials with the organization directly, (BBB, AutoTrader, Consumer Reports logos, etc.) • Check the company’s BBB report at www.denver.bbb.org or by calling 303-758-2100. Only do business online with websites you are familiar with and that have a positive track record. • Make sure the website has a privacy policy. It will contain agreements on how the information you provide on the website will be used and kept private and secure. Print this and keep it in your records. • The privacy policy may also contain the company’s mailing address. Only do business with companies that provide a sure method of contact, should something go wrong. • Do not wire transfer any payment. Wired funds cannot be traced and therefore cannot be recovered if you are a victim of fraud. • If you have become a victim of fraud, contact your BBB and the Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov to file a complaint. Please dont fall for this and report them to law enforcement hopefully yahoo will prevent all the pro scammers from entering data on this site. I am only trying to warn people that the scammers come on yahoo and say that they are a good company when they are a scam. If you feel that this is wrong to post this information please send me an email N I am one of those idiots who fell for the scam. Then the scammers come on YA and tell what a good deal it is. All I'm trying to do is prevent others form becoming and idiot

Who can deny this autoaven.com/stars-automart.com? Denver News BBB Flooded With Complaints On 2 Auto Auction Sites Stars-Automart, Autoaven Sent Cease And Desist Letters POSTED: 12:41 pm MDT August 11, 2009 DENVER -- The Denver office of the Better Business Bureau said its telephone helpline has been jammed with calls from people across the country who are asking about two auto sales Web sites that claim to be headquartered in Denver. According to the BBB, calls have been nonstop and the BBB has sent a "cease and desist" notice regarding trademark infringement to the company because of a fake BBB report the sites link to that falsely shows the company with an A+ rating. The two Web sites list one physical address as 10701 W. Sixth Ave, but that address actually belongs to BBB Accredited business, Automotive Avenues, Inc. Another link goes to 3925 Monaco Parkway, which actually belongs to Cintas Document Management -- a paper shredding company. The two Web sites, www.stars-automart.com and www.autoaven.com, claim to offer sales of repossessed vehicles. The BBB said customers complain that once a majority payment is sent via MoneyGram to a Denver address, the company ceases communication. The company has not responded to the BBB. An Internet check shows the two domain names are registered to a private registration company in Sunnyvale, Calif. The BBB said it sent out the warning because on-delivery and Internet auction fraud were the top two complained-about fraud types at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. "The BBB takes complaints very seriously and does not want any more consumers to be victimized," a news release stated. TheDenverChannel attempted to contact the Web sites without success. The phone number listed on the site goes to a recording, which suggests callers contact them by e-mail. The same section of the stars-automart.com Web site lists a James Stewart as the owner. To protect from online scams, the BBB has the following suggestions: • Verify any organization credentials with the organization directly, (BBB, AutoTrader, Consumer Reports logos, etc.) • Check the company’s BBB report at www.denver.bbb.org or by calling 303-758-2100. Only do business online with websites you are familiar with and that have a positive track record. • Make sure the website has a privacy policy. It will contain agreements on how the information you provide on the website will be used and kept private and secure. Print this and keep it in your records. • The privacy policy may also contain the company’s mailing address. Only do business with companies that provide a sure method of contact, should something go wrong. • Do not wire transfer any payment. Wired funds cannot be traced and therefore cannot be recovered if you are a victim of fraud. • If you have become a victim of fraud, contact your BBB and the Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov to file a complaint. if you were scammed report it to your local police. Make an IC3.com complaint. Call your attny General and file a complaint. Send a notice to the secret service and try to get them to investigate. Get your local police to contact interpol. If you don't hear anything within 4 weeks call your congressman. We will not get any money back but we will shut these guys down and prevent it from happening again

Do you work for SCEA? I wrote an idea letter to sony, but they wrote me back and said "SCEA is unable to accept ideas and inventions, which have not been requested by SCEA" My ideas are not cheep. Please consider requesting this letter if you are a member of SCEA: To Whom It May Concern: Roms, People are downloading roms and emulators left and right. We can already access cross platform games now that the psp, ds, wii, ps3, and xbox360 are compatible to the internet. Why prolong inevitable? Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either be cheated out of their money, or they can join us by licensing an official rom site, and stop loosing millions of dollars because the companies don’t realize that they could be making more money. Its so easy. All the companies have to do is just sign an agreement with each other. Just launch a Nintendo rom site, a Microsoft rom site, and a Sony rom site, and then all the game companies will at least be making extra money from their subscribers. I have a solution, What if the consumer could not enter the official Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo company owned rom site until they actually purchased the console so that when they bought it, they would be given access to unlock its official rom site of that particular console, and share that particular console’s game catalogue with other consoles? Obviously, this would allow that particular console’s catalogue to only be transferable. The consumer will have to buy a second console in order to actually “play” that unlocked catalogue on a separate console. Lets say you bought a Playstation and you unlocked the official Playstation catalogue. The agreement will only allow you to transfer Playstation games to other consoles, but it wont allow you to transfer games from other consoles onto the Playstation until you buy and subscribe to the other console’s rom site and unlock their transferability. Once you buy other consoles, and subscribe to their rom sites, you can then interchange each others catalogues and play which ever games you want on which ever console you want. And if that doesn’t get you interested, this one will: What if each console had two different rom sites to subscribe to. If you buy a Nintendo console, this would mean the consumer can choose to unlock your game catalogue transfer to either a Microsoft outlet, or a Sony outlet. The consumer could choose to subscribe to which ever console outlet they want your catalogue to be transferable for. To unlock the transfer to Microsoft, it will cost “X” amount of dollars to subscribe to this rom site, and to unlock the transfer to Sony, it will cost “A” amount of dallers to subscribe to that rom site. Tripple “A” titles such as Uncharted, Halo, and Metroid could be on an elite list, and would only be transferable if the consumer not only subscribes, but pays a little extra money to unlock each game on the elite list. Game companies won’t have to worry about being black-mailed and pirated anymore, and the consumers will be satisfied with their need to play any game on one desired console. Nobody is getting cheated on, and everybody is happy. The game companies profit from more money, and the gamers get what they have been wanting for decades.

Does anyone know how to get taken off the telemarketors call list freely? I don't know my rights as a consumer who is on almost every telemarketers list it seems. I get calls daily, even on Sundays, mail offers with checks enclosed, catalogs and even magazines I didn't ask for. I have tried sending the magazines back and they refuse to take them back. Im so tired of being harassed. Please help. I found one sight that wants a $9.00 donation in addition to $6.00 every month, it seems to me that we should be able to do this for free. Thanks for the help I really need it.

Why does Wal Mart Stores, Inc not follow their own guidelines and procedures? Bill Lang wants to transfer to a Sam's Club in Colorado as soon as possible. Mr Lang used to be trusted by Max Rafael Waller who made the mistake of telling him everything before the Termination on Monday, 23 April 2007. Team Lead Ambrosio Galvan also knows a lot of dirty secrets at Sam's Club 6625, but is nervous about losing his job if he sides with Max Rafael Waller Sam's Club PD-57 was NOT adhere to by Club Manager Fidel Jacobo and Membership Manager Esperanza Lopez. No documentation of any complaints and the San Fernando Police Department or the Los Angeles Police Department ever showed for a "Work Place Violence." Please show proof since one complaint and one video tape does NOT establish a workplace violence. Neither Mr Jacobo or Ms Lopez wanted to sign the papers of any meeting between two managers and Max Rafael Waller for Legal Documentation. No meetings to address any potentail problems at the Tire and Battery Center were brought up by the Team Lead or Management. Max Rafael Waller formerly Assoc ID 0035 and Operator 007 proudly served from Tuesday, 13 November 1990 - Monday, 23 April 2007 and only needed about nine years to do a minimal of twenty-five years to retire from Wal Mart Stores, Inc. He was one hundred percent vested in Profit Sharing and had a one month vacation allocated per year. Max Rafael Waller 11261 Sproule Avenue Pacoima CA 91331-155118 http://www.myspace.com/max_rafael_waller Naval Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps, N.J.R.O.T.C., and alumn of Les Prestigians ~ Class of 1983. San Fernando Senior High School 11333 O'Melveny Avenue San Fernando CA 91340 Telephone:1-818-365-1121 US Army Active Duty: 1984 - 1988 and Individual Ready Reserve, IRR: 1988-1993 Type of Discharge: Honorable RE-1, which is the highest. One Station Unit Training, OSUT 1st Platoon, 4th Squad Echo Company "Outlaws" 7th Infantry Battalion 1st Infantry Training Brigade "Relentless in Training and Unyielding in Battle" Fort Benning Georgia 31905 Continental United States (CONUS) 2nd Platoon Charlie Company "Hard Core Charlie" 3rd Battalion "Battleforce" 327th Infantry (Air Assault) 1st Infantry Brigade "Always First" (Air Assault) 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) "Screaming Eagles" Fort Campbell Kentucky 42223 United States Army Europe (USAEUR) 3rd Platoon Delta Company "Dogs of War" 1st Battalion "Regulars by God" 6th Infantry (Mechanized) 1st Armored Brigade "Forerunners" 1st Armored Division "Old Ironsides" APO NY NY 09140 Storck Barracks at Illesheim West Germany Sam's Club 6625 12920 Foothill Blvd San Fernando CA 91340 Telephone:1-818-365-7710 Facsimile:1-818-365-0690 Sam's Club Awards Division A, now Region A 3rd Quarter Award for Member Service The award was received at Home office in November 2003 Region 54, now District 55 2nd Quarter Award for Member Service The Awards was received at Sam's Club 6625 in October 2003 Sam's Club 6625 September 2003 Associate of the Month The Awards was received at Sam's Club 6625 in October 2003 Wal Mart Today, now Wal Mart World Member Service Legend How it life started to really go down hill December 2006 Mehmet Ekinci {A Hatchet Man and sent to "clean House" is no longer there but in Fresno according to Mr Jason Fastner} said that he was replacing everyone in the tire shop or its proper title: Tire and Battery Center according to Jeff Lopez{no longer works there} and Mark Castro{has recanted}and Bill Lang heard indirectly but will deny it. Max Rafael Waller studied all of Wal-Mart policies and found that if that his remark {INTIMIDATION} could be verified then he would get a coaching for making such a remark. The others are scared to tell the truth. Fidel Jacobo and Enrique Velarde had possibly everybody at Sam's Club gathering information given out by Max Rafael Waller and will reward them by promotion and/or a payraise along with illegal surveillance that GROSSLY violates the Global Ethics Compliance that Wal-Mart Stores, Inc claims to uphold. Fidel Jacobo might had given misinformation through the tire shop boss, Bill Lang. Fidel Jacobo has received a lot of Anti-Union training Bill told Max if the associates did not follow rules let that be the problem of management. Bill Lang is a Team Lead and so he is required to enforce all rules even IF he disagrees. Sam's Club 6625 did the following tactic as of Wednesday, 4 April 2007 with the participation of members. One African-American tried to talk about the union, but Max's reply "You started inserting the talk about the union and so you want to find out what is going on in my head. You wearing clothes so raggedy that your testicles are showing. If you were FBI you would be in trouble for indecent exposure." He left. TACTICS USED BY SAM'S CLUB 6625 / WAL MART STORES, INC Others Associates and one Caucasian-American named Jarrod tried to be his friend. Jarrod in the past ignore him while his friend that came along with him came from another Sam's Club and they enjoy Good Cop and Bad Cop. Their plan was to have enough approaches to seek "friendship" but they were to seek information and what he was up to since some web sites about Sam's Club 6625 are on the internet. Another tactic used by Sam's Club 6625 / Wal Mart Stores, Inc Wal-Mart Stores, Inc will protect their Public Relations and Image AT ANY COST INCLUDING MAKING A PACT Loyal Customers, "grateful" associates, and their vendors and suppliers. Members where to complain to get Max Rafael Waller and Sam's Club 6625 management would had an easy time had him fired for inferior member service. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc WILL improve and better their ways of operating, but it will NOT be easy. They are NOT as horrible as people claim. To give the Appearance that Max Rafael Waller was causing great harm to Wal-Mart Stores, Inc and Sam's Club they had labeled Interview Questions and "Privileged & Confidential" and its Sam's Club University title is More Than A Gut Feeling Participant's Guide A list of interview questions should be deemed Innocuous that would not be Injurious to Wal-Mart Stores, Inc and Sam's Club. The so called witnesses would had been Mr. Fastener and Mr. Lang of Sam's Club 6625. A print out of this document conveniently did not have a date printed to give an appearance that is so sensitive that it is disruptive. These document bring no harm and it shows how Disingenuous and Duplicitous Samuel Robson Walton and the Legal Division of Wal-Mart Stores really are. Mr. Fastener and Mr. Lang were also giving the amount of money lost on the Profit and Loss so the if their conversation would be on the internet. They were hoping for the amount to have been stated, but the fact that the conversation was written was enough to know that he wrote at MySpace. Around Wednesday, 21 March 2007 he dragged the rotting carcass of a dog so children would not touch it. It was in front on the Pepsi Bottling Plant in San Fernando California 91340 and its entrance is on Dronfield Ave. He might have breathed some Bacteria, Germs or other Biological Agents and maybe some Botulism. Esther Topete on Saturday, 24 March 2007 was watering the front lawn at 11261 Sproule Ave, Pacoima California 91331 and was scared. Max picked up a headless Squirrel that had a foul stench and maggots and placed in the garbage bin. INTIAL ATTEMPT TO DISCREDIT WITH A PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION A possible misdiagnosis {two EKG readings, Blood tests, Urine Tests, and Lung X-rays}but no medicine was initiated by Scott Wang MD from Providence Holy Cross Medical Center 15301 Rinaldi St Mission Hills CA 91345 Telephone: 1-818-365-8051 Max was scared because he had a high heart rate and cloudy vision, but it turned out that it could have been a result of MEGADOSING on vitamins and minerals a one result is VITAMIN INTOXICATION. Dr Scott Wang's name could not be found at their website http://www.providence.org/losangeles/facilities/providence_holy_cross/default.htm An old white man claiming to be from a PET {Positive Emitting Tomography} Psychiatric team from Kaiser Permanente never left a business card or a phone number for communication. With a PET scan something called RFID can be planted and placed strategically at vital part of the body to electronically kill Max by devious people and this method of killing American Dissenters is from the FBI and the US Military. It is in the Black Operations of the US Federal Government. They also do Electromagnetic Harassment so please visit http://www.mdspec.com The old white man looked like an actor from Law and Order portraying a Psychiatrist and this IS ILLEGAL. Kaiser Permanente's Behavioral Health Care Member Help Line and their telephone: 1-800-900-3277 On Sunday, 1 April 2007 Dr Paul R Hladon Kaiser Permanente 13652 Cantara St Panorama City CA 91402 Telephone: 1-818-375-2377 A possible misdiagnosis since Max had a burning sensation of his Bronchial tubes and Dr Hladon reluctantly gave the medicine. At first he said it was a possible Acid Reflux BUT HE MIGHT HAVE MISDIAGNOSED OR RUSHED TO MAX OUT OF THE WAY! Someone at Kaiser Permanente placed a magazine despicting death possibly the Filipino Nurses. They claimed that they do NOT have a Physician Desk Reference{http://www.pdrhealth.com/ } which can tell about Dessicant Bacteria and its Incubation Period. The Nursing staff was Disigenous and Duplicitous and COULD NOT BE TRUSTED FOR A HONEST ANSWER ! Dr Paul R Hladon gave RELUCTANTLY Max two prescriptions: Azithromycin Tablet 250MG{Take two tablets daily for seven days} and Ciprofloxacin HCL Tablet 500MG{Take one tablet orally two times a day for fourteen days}. Dr. Hladon had two X-Rays so how did he know to give WHAT medicine{prescription} without blood work and being tested for anything out of the ordinary ? Misdiagnosis kills almost 100,000 Americans yearly! The secret for Wal-Mart not getting caught using tactics, fear and intimidation, is simple: a lot of unwritten rules so there is no evidence. A lot of non-managers associates will respond by saying they see or know nothing of improper treatment. They will also have selective memory. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc has a persistent Legal Divsion that rivals the US Federal Government and has many victories on its belt. It can be verified just ask the New York Times for confirmation. Wal Mart Stores, Inc violate their own Global Ethics policies. Their Global Ethics Office have stated that they only handle Age Discrimination. Read the United Nations Global Compact http://www.unglobalcompact.org/AboutTheGC/TheTenPrinciples/principle10.html http://www.unglobalcompact.org/Issues/transparency_anticorruption/index.html http://www.iccwbo.org/policy/anticorruption/iccfccd/index.html?cookies=no Institute for Global Ethics http://www.globalethics.org/ The FBI will discredit American Dissenters by all necessary means like Biological and Psychological war along with Electronic from their world famous Behavioral Science Unit or BSU The FBI protect multi-national conglomerates Group Stalking and Electromagnetic Harassment are some their tactics. COVERT ELECTROMAGNETIC HARASSMENT The heart has a frequncy and cycle and the EKG also looks for a rythm Two EKG's were done at Holy Cross Hospital by Dr. Scott Wang and with the frequncy the FBI {every day and night}are sending just barely audible to inaudible Electromagnetic pulses and signals PLEASE visit to understand to dark side of the US Federal Government http://www.mdspec.com http://www.homeland-security-join.com http://www.secretangel.tv Use use the Freedom of Information Act and expect the FBI to stone walled and cite National Security and National Interest More on the FBI and US Homeland Security Surveillance, Psychotronics and (Gang)Stalking Operations The Xiandos web site is http://xiandos.info/Surveillance,_Psychotronics_and_(Gang-)Stalking_Operations To verify the FBI's LACK OF COOPERATION Please call 1-310-477-6565 and if they respond only with FBI keep on pressing with the question "May I please have your name." Ask if they were investigating Max Rafael Waller The FBI{twice} were given via e-mail, max_rafael_waller@hotmail.com, the following pertaining to Max Rafael Waller; Social Security Account Number, Driver's License Number with expiration date, Home and Work Address with their telephone numbers. Misinformation has been used succesfully by the LAPD, SFPD, FBI, and etcetera. Bureau of Security and Investigative Services of the State of California http://www2.dca.ca.gov/pls/wllpub/WLLQRYNA$LCEV2.QueryView?P_LICENSE_NUMBER=15863&P_LTE_ID=651 Lincesee Name: Weinhold Investigations License Type: Private Investigator License Number: 15863 License Status: CLEAR Definition (Status Definition: The License/Registration/Permit is current and valid. ) Expiration Date: September 30, 2008 Issue Date: September 29, 1992 City: PINON HILLS County: SAN BERNARDINO Actions: No Business Owners: Weinhold, Peter Herman Related Licenses/Registrations/Permits: No records returned Disciplinary Actions: No records returned This information is updated Monday through Friday - Last updated: APR-24-2007 Disclaimer All information provided by the Department of Consumer Affairs on this web page, and on its other web pages and internet sites, is made available to provide immediate access for the convenience of interested persons. While the Department believes the information to be reliable, human or mechanical error remains a possibility, as does delay in the posting or updating of information. Therefore, the Department makes no guarantee as to the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, currency, or correct sequencing of the information. Neither the Department, nor any of the sources of the information, shall be responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the use or results obtained from the use of this information. Other specific cautionary notices may be included on other web pages maintained by the Department. All access to and use of this web page and any other web page or internet site of the Department is governed by the Disclaimers and Conditions for Access and Use as set forth at California Department of Consumer Affairs' Information and Use of Information(http://www.dca.ca.gov/disclaim.htm). Another headache for Max Rafael Waller Everyone, Managers and Non-Managers, at Sam's Club 6625 willingly volunteered. In December 2006 Pete Weinhold, unkown to Max Rafael Waller, was trying to save a Private Security contract with Sam's Club 6625 and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Pete Weinhold might be working at the Sam's Club in Santa Clarita Sam's Club and in possible contact with Bill Lang who is in denial. Pete Weinhold owns a Private Security firm and is a Private Investigator licensed in the State of California. Mr. Weinhold's Private Security firm employed retired and active Peace Officers. Peace Officers have Police Powers but NOT regular Private Security firms and thus Pete Weinhold can charge extra for this. Mr. Pete Weinhold was desperate to save his contract at Sam's Club 6625 and he found an angle; Max Rafael Waller might be an Internet Predator and Pedophile. Mr Weinhold might be at the Sam's Club in Santa Clarita California. Los Angeles Police Officer Julian Almaraz used to work for Pete Weinhold. Three Questions to Mr Pete Weinhold Why does Mr Pete Weinhold not explain his investigation to make peace ? Is it possible that he broke a lot of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties along with Los Angeles Police Department and San Fernando Police Department ? Will Internal Affairs of the Los Angeles Police Department and San Fernando Police Department get involved or has it becomed a Political Hot Potato ? A failed Sting Operation around February 2007 Undercover Police, two white on the inside and two hispanic waiting outside, were setting up Max Rafael Waller at the MacDonalds in the shopping Center were Sam's Club 6625 is at. The bait was a hispanic looking girl at the register who was possibly under eighteen years old. Max Rafael Waller wanted to show proof that some strangers can be trusted so he showed his id with his home address. The one Undercover asked the other do we spring the trap ? The other said not yet. The reason is that showing were someone lives is NOT illegal and reason enough, BUT what would had sprung the trap was that she would be asked to come to his home and the trap FAILED MISERABLY due to the fact that the girl was NOT invited or given a suggestion for a future contact ! A male manager from MacDonalds who looked middle eastern was nervous HAD confirmed it. No evidence has been found to justify surveillance and justify tactics used by the US Homeland Security and local Law Enforcement. PLEASE show all of the information gathered ! Who are involved: the Los Angeles Police Department, the San Fernando Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a lot of associates from Sam's Club 6625 and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. The following have been written around the middle of April 2007 and never responded even though a mailing address was given, except Barbara Boxer. US Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) http://boxer.senate.gov/ Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/ Harry Reid (D-NV) http://reid.senate.gov/ Hillary Clinton (D-NY) http://clinton.senate.gov/ Chuck Schumer (D-NY) http://www.senate.gov/~schumer/ Arlen Specter (R-PA) http://specter.senate.gov/ Russ Feingold (D-WI) http://feingold.senate.gov/ Patrick Leahy (D-VT) http://leahy.senate.gov/ US Congress Howard Berman (D) 28th District of California http://www.house.gov/berman/ Nancy Pelosi (D) the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives 8th Congressional District of California http://speaker.house.gov/ Max Rafael Waller has plenty of "Dirty Laundry" or to simply write: acts that are questionable. Sam's Club 6625 Associates are possibly spreading misinformation in the San Fernando Valley especially in Pacoima. One of the is possibly a Check Out Supervisor, COS, Jay with a woman at a cell phone store in Pacoima on Foothill Blvd between Pierce St and Terra Bella St. and this came from a relative of Max.

Coastal publications ****BEWARE ALL*****? Source ( Better Business Bureua) http://www.bbbhou.org/mem_intro.html CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE This company operates what is called a work at home scheme. We suggest you listen carefully to the entire report to understand what this promotion is. It is important to know that almost all work at home schemes end up with complaints even though they may have none when they first start. They usually go out of business or face government action. Most work at home schemes involve stuffing envelopes, mailing circulars, or sending for information packets from a list of addresses. The promoter may tell you that it is all 'legitimate' or 'approved by the Post Office.' It is not! The promoter may claim you can earn lots of money working from home. They may also state that, due to an increase in the use of home computers and the Internet, this is a 'home based business opportunity.' If it involves stuffing envelopes or mailing circulars, it is a work at home scheme and you will lose your money. No real employer would pay you to sit at home and do these jobs in this era of high tech mass mailing. Since this BBB was founded in 1921, we have never seen any consumer make money at this unless they were running the scheme. You should know that US Postal Inspectors investigate and prosecute people involved in these promotions and you could find yourself the subject of criminal action for mail fraud.

RECALL of PET FOOD - why would they delete my question? RECALL of PET FOOD - why would they delete my question? How can they say they want a "safe and useful community" and send me this in an e-mail? "You have posted content to Yahoo! Answers in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. As a result, your content has been deleted. Community Guidelines help to keep Yahoo! Answers a safe and useful community, so we appreciate your consideration of its rules. Deleted Question: RECALL dog & cat massive pet food recall, kidney failure, death, please check your pantry? Question Details: MANY DIFFERENT BRANDS, CANS & POUCHES, CAT & DOG FOODS A complete list of the recalled products along with product codes, descriptions and production dates was available from the Menu Foods Web site — http://www.menufoods.com/recall... — and consumers also could call (866) 463-6738. If you feel this content was removed in error, please contact Customer Care and tell us why. Regards, Yahoo! Customer Care " ?

Tony Kornheiser AT MNF? Having a little intelligence, I have had to opt to not watch MNF or watch without sound (puts me to sleep) or watch with a radio nearby to avoid Tony Kornheiser. His sight and sounds are disgusting, then add to that the words/topics that he speaks about. Give us a break! He has been associated with the "Dennis Miller" era as being .0003 degrees above Miller. The only thing/way to get the message across clearly is to manage to watch and send HORDES of mail to the sponsors of MNF listing unhappiness/disgust. Of course, those 3 people that like hi can do the same. Point being, ESPN is like General Motors "They watch/buy what we give them". Not true! Give us godawful and we, the consumer, we show you what godawful does...over time.

please check the following mail and confir m about the validit of authentcity? Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:37:48 +0000 (GMT) From: "Halifax Bank Plc" <halifax.bankplc@yahoo.co.uk> Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert Yahoo! DomainKeys has confirmed that this message was sent by yahoo.co.uk. Learn more Subject: WELCOME TO HALIFAX BANK PLC (ATTENTION : Saqlain Tauraizue Ahmad) To: sakrez@yahoo.com Halifax Bank PLC 2 PARADISE STREET LIVERPOOL L1 8JF London Email: halifaxbankingonline@yahoo.co.uk info_halifaxbank@fbenv.net Tel;+44-704-570-9563 +44-701-115-0386 Fax: +447075055364 27th February, 2007 TRANSFER PROCESS Attn;Saqlain Tauraizue Ahmad, Good day to you my name is Mr. John Kerry and welcome to Halifax Bank PLC. Please be informed that a Cheque of the Yahoo Lottery Promo in the sum of $800,000.00 USD (Eight Hundred Thousand Us Dollars) in your name was delivered to us this morning by the Lottery Organization for online wire transfer. Please be informed that before we can proceed to transfer the fund, a transit account has to be activated/opened for you. It is this account that the said fund ($800,000.00) would be deposited. Once this account has been activated/opened, you would transfer online the said fund to any of your designated bank account across the globe. So you are therefore required to pay an account activation fee to open the transit account. All banks in the UK , including ours, are authorized and regulated by the Financial Services Authority and as a result, clients are required to abide by the Banking policies of the British Government by making security deposit for ACTIVATION FEES. The Financial Services Authority is the independent regulator set up by Government to look after the financial services industry and protect consumers. The activation fee is £300 Great British Pounds The United States Dollars Equivalent of this is $589.229 Note that we can not continue with the online bank transfer until the activation fees is paid because this said fund has to be deposited into an account before it can be transferred to you. This is in accordance with section 17(1) (n) of the National Online Transfer Act as adopted in 1998 and amended on 3rd July 2001 by Parliament. Note; that your total prizes claim has been insured to the real value and as such the ACTIAVTION FEE cannot be deducted from it. This is in accordance with section 13(n) of the national gambling acts as adopts this in 1993 and amended on 3RD July 1996. This is to protect winners and to avoid misappropriation of funds Payment for the activation fees can be made either via WESTERN UNION MONEY TRANSFER. On receipt of this email you are to contact us to provide you with details of our Accounts Manager to effect payment. Upon your reply and consent I would provide you with the necessary details to effect payment for the 'ACTIVATION FEE" Yours Faithfully, Mr. John Kerry Account Officer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. DeleteReplyForwardSpamMove... Previous | Next | Back to Messages Save Message Text | Full Headers Check MailCompose Search Mail: Search MailSearch the Web Move Options [New Folder] CHENAB Forward Options As Inline Text As Attachment Reply Options Reply To Sender Reply To Everyone Mail Shortcuts Check Mail Ctrl++C Compose Ctrl++P Folders Ctrl++F Advanced Search Ctrl++S Options Help Ctrl++H Address Book Shortcuts Add Contact Add Category View Contacts View Lists QuickBuilder Import Contacts Synchronize Addresses Options Addresses Help Calendar Shortcuts Add Event Add Task Add Birthday Day Week Month Year Event List Reminders Tasks Sharing Synchronize Calendar Options Calendar Help Notepad Shortcuts Add Note Add Folder View Notes Notepad Options Notepad Help Advanced Search Advanced Search

How do I get consumers to do this? Get your local advertiser to get on this postcard, we mail the postcard to his/her zip code homes. The consumer spends as little as $25.00 at that location and get a $25.00 gift card for Gas or Grocery, pretty much a no brainer - the advertisers only pays $300.00 to get on the list and gets 12 - $25.00 gift cards = $300.00 also a no brainer. You get $100.00 for each advertiser you get on the postcard. What could be so easy? We just cant get to all the advertisers in your town, we don't know who they are, you do. Use the junk mail you get in your mail box monthly for leads.

In California, the law states that a landlord has 21 days to get a deposit back to tenant. Can someone clarify? I would like to know if this means they can mail it on day 21 and still meet the requirement or if it has to be in the hands of the tenant on day 21. Thanks. According to the Department of Consumer Affairs: Under California law, 21 calendar days or less after you move, your landlord must either: Send you a full refund of your security deposit, or Mail or personally deliver to you an itemized statement that lists the amounts of any deductions from your security deposit and the reasons for the deductions, together with a refund of any amounts not deducted Thank you. Yes, I understand they don't have to return the deposit if they have a reason to keep it. In my case, they have no reason to keep it.

Sounds to be true?????What do you think? I received an email: THE PEPSI COMPANY OFFICIAL PRIZE NOTIFICATION. We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded annual final draws held October 2007 by Pepsi in conjunction with the European Gaming Prize Consumer Award Promotion, your email was among the 20 Lucky winners who won E1,500,000.00 (One Million, Five hundred Thousand Euros) each on the; THE PEPSI COMPANY LOTTERY PROMOTION. However, your email was attached to ticket number (000000) and ballot ticket number 000000). The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 25,000,000 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet. However, no tickets were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different ticket numbers for representation and privacy. In other to claim your E1,500,000.00 (One Million, Five ....fill up the .......

Do you use Glade Plug ins??? If so READ THIS!!!? HOUSE FIRES - PLEASE READ AND PASS ON TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW >> >> Received from a friend who is in the property insurance business. It is >> well worth reading. This is one of those e-mails that if you didn't send >> it, rest assured someone on your list will suffer for not reading it. The >> original message was written by a lady whose brother and his wife learned >> a hard lesson this past week. Their house burned down... nothing left but >> ashes. They have good insurance so the house will be replaced with most >> of the contents - that is the good news. However, they were sick when >> they found out the cause of the fire. >> >> The insurance investigator sifted through the ashes for several hours. He >> had the cause of the fire traced to the master bathroom. He asked her >> sister-in-law what she had plugged in the bathroom. She listed the normal >> things....curling iron, blow dryer. He kept saying to her, "No, this >> would be something that would disintegrate at high temperatures". Then >> her sister-in-law remembered she had a Glade Plug-In, in the bathroom. >> The investigator said that was the cause of the fire. He said he has seen >> more house fires started with the plug-in type room fresheners than >> anything else. He said the plastic they are made from is THIN plastic. He >> also said that in every case there was nothing left to prove that it even >> existed. When the investigator looked in the wall plug, sure enough the >> two prongs left from the plug-in were still in there. Her sister-in-law >> had one of the plug-ins that had a small night light built in it. She >> said she had noticed that the light would dim and then finally go out. >> She would walk in to the bathroom a few hours later, and the light would >> be back on again. The investigator said that it was getting too hot, and >> would dim and go out rather than just blow the light bulb. Once it cooled >> down it would come back on. That is a warning sign . The investigator >> said he personally wouldn't have any type of plug in fragrance device >> anywhere in his house. He has seen too many places that have been burned >> down due to them. >> >> >> HOUSE FIRES PLEASE READ (From Chief Dornell) >> >> Ok, I had one similar to this at my place in the mountains; it used the >> slide-in packets. Last weekend I unplugged it to use the outlet and found >> that the unit had melted and scorched the face of the outlet so I decided >> to replace the outlet. I went to my panel and shut off the circuit >> breaker. Upon pulling the cover plate I found that the outlet had burnt >> away, melted a considerable portion in the interior plastic wall box and >> wire insulation. Obviously, this got very hot and I was very lucky that >> this did not cause a fire in the wall because I would have certainly lost >> my place. Notice that my breaker did not trip and I manually shut it off. >> I need to investigate why. Perhaps it was a steady current and never >> caused a surge or arcing that would have tripped the circuit breaker. I >> am encouraging everyone I know to pass on the fact that these are >> potentially dangerous. The Consumer Products Safety Commission does not >> have a recall on the specific model that I was using. However, they will >> be hearing from me. Our Fire Prevention personnel will be using the >> remnant that I brought back to help spread the word through the Fire >> Prevention community as well. If you use something similar to this or >> other "plug-in" products take the time to pull them and toss them. We >> can't afford to be the proving grounds for these devices. It is my >> opinion that these are unsafe and should be pulled before something >> tragic occurs. >> >> PLEASE PASS THESE TWO TRUE STORIES ON TO ALL THE PEOPLE IN YOUR ADDRESS >> BOOK. >> >> NOT ONLY COULD IT SAVE SOMEONE'S HOUSE, BUT IT COULD SAVE SOMEONE'S LIFE.

plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.? November 5, 2006 Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi By DEXTER FILKINS 1. London, August 2006 Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way. The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children. The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began. For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards. But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster. “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now. “We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.” Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists). In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake. “It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.” It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included. “In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’ “What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.” Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native. “I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.” And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi? Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq? 2. Mushkhab, January 2005 The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want. We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long. The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast. An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans. The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest. “Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.” Everyone laughs. We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone. “My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.” He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him. “On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.” Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret. It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink. Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf. By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon. Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street. More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase. It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day. The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head. “Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.” No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became. In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him. On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come. Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining. “The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.” Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East. It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort. For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer. But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him. “Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.” 3. Baghdad, October 2005 Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari. Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq. Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market. “Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.” Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie. On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate. “Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.” Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003. Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein. Dexter Filkins The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall. For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.” One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.” Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist. Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would. The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true. “For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.” So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway. A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice. One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out. “Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.” 4. Washington, November 2005 The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten. Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister. Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming. “This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps. Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.” By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco. “Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.” Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said. As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries. “He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch. The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.” Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement. “There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi. Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?” There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government. “I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ” A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.” Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq. Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him. It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi & Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade. “In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says. This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me. One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein. “We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?” Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi. “I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.” Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs. “It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says. But the story doesn’t end there. A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.) Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks. David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it. “In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.” Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.” Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources. “We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.” Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.” Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear? “I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.” 5. Tehran, November 2005 Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran. The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does. “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials. “Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.” Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries. In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world. An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared. More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks. Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser. I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.” Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room. At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together. As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless. Chalabi played it cool. “The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad. Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.” For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art? So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves. “Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands. We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro. “Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.” A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind. For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men. “It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes. Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact. Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear. 6. Baghdad, December 2005 A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes. As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask. “Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English. Whom are you going to vote for? “The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.” When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged. But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street. The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate. Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election. He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate. As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots. But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war. Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end. Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer. 7. London, August 2006 The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own. He doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”

What can I do to straighten out a mistake a student loan company made? A student loan company has been sending me invoices for a few months now. The problem is that the person they are referring to has the same name as I do with the exception of the middle name. His middle initial is "L", but I don't have a middle name. They called me a while back and I told them the problem. When asked if my SS# was such and such, I said no. They then asked me if I attended the University of Oregon, I think it was. I said no and gave them the name of the college I attended. They then said, "Oh, ok." and hung up. I figured the matter had been settled and they realized they had the wrong person. What I'm guessing happened is that this other person with the same name as myself was listed under my contact information, and now I'm getting his invoices. I've already begun paying my own loans off as of August. So, I'm all set as far as paying off the debt. However, I am STILL getting the invoices of this other person with the same name as myself. I've cleared this up twice with this loan company and they are still sending me invoices. I recieved another letter from them today saying that "the default of (my) student loan(s) has been reported to the national consumer reporting agencies" and that my "credit rating may have been damaged by the reporting of (my) default". Now, I'm almost positive that they don't have my SS# and instead have this other person's, with my name, instead. I'm thinking that this poor other guy hasn't even recieved any of these invoices and is oblivious that his credit may be damaged. I plan on calling them again tomorrow to clear this up once and for all. My question is, if this third time doesn't straighten the matter out, what else can I do? Also, if it makes any difference, this loan company sending me these invoices is "Northwest Education Loan Association" or NELA. I took my loan out with "American Eduction Services". What I'm wondering is, how did this other loan company confuse my contact/mailing info with someone else's even though I never took a loan out with them? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've just gotten off of the phone with the company and what had happened was the first two times I'd called, I'd been directed to the wrong department and the mistake was never cleared. This time, however, I was directed to the default loan department and the representative confirmed the mistake by asking me if the last 4 digits of my SS# was so and so and I'd said no. Also, my birthday did not match the one they had on record. She'd told me that what had happened was that my mailing address was mixed up with this other person's via the yellow pages. Anyway, I'm sure the mistake has been settled and I appreciate your all's input :D And I just checked my credit report online and it's perfect.

Europhiles? if the EU has no affect on our daily lives, What is this then? Household: Home Information Packs (HIPs); Fortnightly bin collections; Higher household electricity bills, more wind turbines; Soaring water bills. Consumer affairs: Higher food prices; Written and pictorial health warnings on cigarette packets (including what font to be used); Disappearance of the Crown signs on pints; Lists of ingredients and warnings on food products; Phasing out of incandescent bulbs; Expensive electrical goods, and higher Council tax; New Royal Mail pricing rules; Bureaucracy at the bank; High price of energy saving products; Banning vitamins and minerals; Fewer and more expensive fish; Extinction of swathes of vegetable varieties; The end of selling in pounds and ounces only. Transport and motoring: Car booster seats for children; Photocard driving licences; End of many rural bus routes; Creation of Railtrack; Harder and more expensive motorcycle tests; Preventing the return of the Routemaster bus; In future, all new cars will need to keep headlights on during the day. Law and order: Government’s inability to expel EU criminals from the UK. Media, sport and Entertainment: TV airtime quotas; Banning caps on foreign football players, higher wages, higher ticket prices for fans; Abolition of the 192 inquiries service and replacement with 118; Television advertising rules. Workplace: Banning workers from earning higher wages instead of taking holidays. Economy: The run on Northern Rock; Northern Rock downsizing; Post office closures. Health: Fewer training hours for doctors, compromised patient safety; Higher costs for the NHS. Before you dismiss this, all this came from the horses mouth! Here are all the references to EU Directives implemented in the last decade! the EU’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (2002/91/EC), Fortnightly bin collections. The EU’s Landfill Directive (1999/31/EC) the EU Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC), the EU Tobacco Products Directive Television Without Frontiers Directive (89/552/EEC). Disappearance of the Crown signs on pints. The EU’s Measuring Instruments Directive (2004/22/EC), The EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (2002/96/EC), the EU Postal Services Directive (97/67/EC) The Insurance Mediation Directive (2002/92/EC), The Distance Marketing Directive (2002/65/EC) The EU’s Food Supplements Directive (2002/46/EC) EU law (Directive 80/181/EEC), EU Directives 2003/20/EC, 91/439/EC, 98/95/EC, 2003/33/EC, (2001/37/EC), 2003/641/EC. What do you think? ;) Sissel - at least people can email me if they don't agree with what i say, they i will be only happy to back up my point. you carry on hiding behind your sickle & hammer.....Oooops i meant EU flag. hehe. i think the correct term is BOOYAHH!!!!

I am trying to convince my parents to buy me a macbook pro i wrote this list well what do you think? 20 Reasons Why I Need a Macbook Pro 1.Macs are more reliable. In the past 8 months my computer has had to have the Os re-installed 4 times, 3 for hard drive problems and 1 for a virus. Mac’s are very reliable machines according to consumer reports, and multiple reviews online such as C-net, Notebook reviews, Consumer reports, ECT. Mark the Mac book pro as a very good Computer, better than a PC. 2.Macs Run windows to! On a Macbook Pro I Can Run Windows as well as Mac OS X through Boot Camp. So in way I will get the best of both worlds I can run Mac OS X for internet and video editing and music editing, then I can run Windows Vista for Games, Office, and Windows Exclusive programs I might need. 3.I Know How to Use Macs. I can use a Mac much better than a PC. I was taught how to use them in elementary school. Right down to how to use all of the Mac office programs. 4.No Viruses! On Macs there are no viruses, which means that I can /surf the web with confidence my computer is safe. 5.If my Mac breaks no problem! With Apple care I can call Apple and my problem is fixed either by an apple expert helping me through it our by sending my computer to apple. Were as with a PC if it breaks Basically your screwed, first you have to find the problem, then call support then figure out how to fix it, then try do to do all of the things that you have no clue on how to do. No no no no with a Mac I call apple and since Macs are so simple with a description of my problem I have an answer. 6.A Mac Will Help Me in School. Last year I had 12 late or missing essays and research assignments because my computer was broken. On a Mac if it breaks I just send it to apple and in a few days I get a new computer for free. But it takes weeks to fix a PC. 7.They Last Forever!!!!!! On a Mac the Requirements to run software are very slim, the average life of a Mac is about 5 years compared to the 2 year life of a PC. 8.I can Use a Mac for Everything!!! Since Macs run Windows and Mac OS X there is no such thing as incompatible software. 9.You May Say at This Point “I am Convinced you need a Mac, But why a Macbook pro?” Well a Macbook pro is a notebook, which means I can use it anywhere. For example what if I have a huge report I have to do over the weekend but we are going to grandmas house, well I could take my Macbook pro and I could work on a report, and study for a test with a preloaded study guide. 10.I will get A’s on my report Card. With a Mac there are no viruses and they are notably reliable so there is no excuse of my computer had a virus, or the “it was broken” excuse. A Macbook pro will help me excel in school and in extra activities I do such as movie making and video games and there is guitar learning software. 11.Since I will be using the computer I should get the computer I want to use. What you guys have to remember is that the next computer I’m going to get will be my computer, so in that case I should get the computer that I want to use, not the one that you want me to use. 12.If I get the Macbook pro I will have enough space on my desk to do other things. Such as homework, or work. Right now my desk is too crowded with CRT monitors to do work; well a laptop would take care of that. 13.There is a brand new update. An update came out on June 5th which means that I will get the most advanced technology now. 14.A Macbook pro is the most powerful notebook and most powerful Mac other than the Mac pro. 15.I have two lives. If I came home from school one day and I found my computer broken my dell, I would have to wait for dad to fix it. But with a Mac I can run Windows and OS X so if OS X dies I can use windows because it uses a separate portion of the hard drive, and vise versa. 16.Apple is the only company that makes the software and the hardware. On a Mac the software is made to use all of the advantages of the hardware. Were as on a PC the software is made to be used on 100 companies computers 17.All the programs I use and want to use are on Mac. I use iTunes and that’s a program designed for Mac. I cant use iMovie, or Logic. 18.A new OS is about to be released. Leopard is about to be released, with many more features than tiger. 19.I can use .mac. .mac is a net based e-mail and web page publisher and internet storage. With many other features. 20.Macs just work. Macs are so simple a caveman can use them, they work so well, and they are so easy to use that you can use it to learn languages, or to learn how to play an instrument. They just work, were as with a PC needs to have lessons to learn how to use it. With a Macbook pro I can just do everything and have everything work. Reasons 1-20 are the reasons I need a Macbook pro. oh yeah and btw im not asking people about the classic mac or windows im asking if my list is good, dont answer if your gonna say something such as "buy a pc instead"

did you know about this? E mail surcharge? Subject: E-MAIL SURCHARGE Dear Internet Subscriber: Please read the following carefully if you intend to stay online and continue using email: The last few months have revealed an alarming trend in the Government of the United States attempting to quietly push through legislation that will affect your use of the Internet. Under proposed legislation the U.S. Postal Service will be attempting to bilk email users out of "alternate postage fees". Bill 602P will permit the Federal Govt to charge a 5 cent surcharge on every email delivered, by billing Internet Service Providers at source. The consumer would then be billed in turn by the ISP. Washington D.C. lawyer Richard Stepp is working without pay to prevent this legislation from becoming law. The U.S. Postal Service is claiming that lost revenue due to the proliferation of email is costing nearly $230,000,000 in revenue per year. You may have noticed their recent ad campaign "There is nothing like a letter". Since the average citizen received about 10 pieces of email per day in 1998, the cost to the typical individual would be an additional 50 cents per day, or over $180 dollars per year, above and beyond their regular Internet costs. Note that this would be money paid directly to the U.S. Postal Service for a service they do not even provide. The whole point of the Internet is democracy and non-interference. If the federal government is permitted to tamper with our liberties by adding a surcharge to email, who knows where it will end. You are already paying an exorbitant price for snail mail because of bureacratic efficiency. It currently takes up to 6 days for a letter to be delivered from New York to Buffalo. If the U.S. Postal Service is allowed to tinker with email, it will mark the end of the "free" Internet in the United States. One congressman, Tony Schnell (r) has even suggested a "twenty to forty dollar per month surcharge on all Internet service" above and beyond the government's proposed email charges. Note that most of the major newspapers have ignored the story, the only exception being the Washingtonian which called the idea of email surcharge "a useful concept who's time has come" March 6th 1999 Editorial) Don't sit by and watch your freedoms erode away! Send this email to all Americans on your list and tell your friends and relatives to write to their congressman and say "No!" to Bill 602P. Kate Turner Assistant to Richard Stepp, Berger, Stepp and Gorman Attorneys at Law 216 Concorde Street, Vienn

DON'T BUY ANYTHING FROM J.R. DIGITAL(OR COMPUTER) SOLUTIONS!!! It is a scam and I was hit.? I tried to buy a Sony Camera from J.R. Digital Solutions and checked back a few weeks later to find the store had been removed from yahoo. I tried to e-mail the seller and found their e-mail account was not operational. Avoid the headaches I felt, Search Yahoo (or Google) for J.R. Digital Solutions to see other consumer complaints. I just recently searched and found a listing for J.R. Computer Solutions (I think he/she is up to their old tricks but under a different name), avoid them as well. Also be careful as if this guy/girl catches wind that people know his/her scam, they might try the whole thing under a new name (i.e. drop the whole J.R. thing all together).

Has Montcalm Publishing of New York Gone Out of Business? Montcalm Publishing (401 Park Ave S, NYC, NY 10016) published Fox Magazine and other adult magazines. Currently, their 800 numbers and 212 area code number are out-of-service and I have not received any issues of Fox since the January '08 one. They owe me 20 issues on my subscription, plus other items I paid for from them in 2007. I tried an online search but cannot find any specific notice about their going out of business. I checked the BBB New York office website and find them listed as "unsatisfactory" with unresolved complaints. There doesn't seem to be a way to check with the NY State Attorney General's Office of Consumer Protection online or via phone; I have to mail in a complaint form. Does anyone have any details about their status or information about how they ceased operations, if they actually did fail?

Can anyone give me advice on a payday loan problem? I recently made the huge mistake of taking out a payday loan with an internet company by the name of 500 Fast Cash. The amount of my loan was for $300. I had NEVER done a payday loan before in my entire life, but I was in a very tight spot as I had some emergent, unexpected expenses and was right in between paydays. When I got the loan, I called 500 Fast Cash and told them to be sure to take out the entire $300 plus the $90 fee on my next payday so that I could be done with it. By the time my payday came around, I checked my bank account online and 500 Fast Cash had only taken out $90. I got right on the phone with them and told them that I had specifically asked them to take the entire $390 out and not just the $90. The person on the phone was VERY rude and argumentative. She insisted that they had no record of me ever calling them and telling them to do that, even though I both called AND sent them an e-mail! She was very unprofessional and her exact words were, "Like, for real, I have like no record of you ever calling us." She sounded like she was no older than 16 or 17!. I finally got sick of arguing with her and told her to just make sure that they take it all out of my account on my next payday in 2 more weeks, which she said they would. Two weeks later, on my next payday, they did it again. They only took the $90 out of my checking account. This time, I didn't even bother calling them back or e-mailing them, but I got right on the phone with the Consumer Credit Protection department for my state. I explained the situation to them and they informed me that 500 Fast Cash isn't even licensed in my state, therefore, should not even be conducting any business whatsoever with anyone who lives in my state. In fact, they told me that there are only 12 payday loan companies who ARE licensed in my state, and none of them are internet companies. They even gave me the state government web site that lists all of the licensed payday loan companies where I live. Sure enough, there are only 12 and they are all local. The guy with Consumer Credit Protection even said that my only real option to get out of the whole mess would be to close out my bank account and open up a new one, which I did yesterday. He said that if I didn't do that, he was pretty certain that they would just continue to debit my account and cost me an absolute fortune. Here is my question: Should I contact 500 Fast Cash and tell them that I have found out directly from my state that they are not even licensed to do business here and tell them that I will be filing a complaint with the BBB, my state, etc.? If I do contact them (most likely in writing through e-mail), should I tell them who I am and give them my so-called "account number" that they assigned me so that they know who they are dealing with? I'm so mad about this, but even angrier at myself for dealing with any internet payday loan company. I will never do this again! I am looking for helpful answers. Please don't refer me to other payday loan companies or give me criticism for getting into this mess! This is the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life and I freely admit it!

Can someone help me with my payday loan mess? I recently made the huge mistake of taking out a payday loan with an internet company by the name of 500 Fast Cash. The amount of my loan was for $300. I had NEVER done a payday loan before in my entire life, but I was in a very tight spot as I had some emergent, unexpected expenses and was right in between paydays. When I got the loan, I called 500 Fast Cash and told them to be sure to take out the entire $300 plus the $90 fee on my next payday so that I could be done with it. By the time my next payday came around, I checked my bank account online and 500 Fast Cash had only taken out $90. I got right on the phone with them and told them that I had specifically asked them to take the entire $390 out and not just the $90. The person on the phone was VERY rude and argumentative. She insisted that they had no record of me ever calling them and telling them to do that, even though I both called AND sent them an e-mail! She was very unprofessional and her exact words were, "Like, for real, I have like no record of you ever calling us." She sounded like she was no older than 16 or 17!. I finally got sick of arguing with her and told her to just make sure that they take it all out of my account on my next payday in 2 more weeks, which she said they would. Two weeks later, on my next payday, they did it again. They only took the $90 out of my checking account. This time, I didn't even bother calling them back or e-mailing them, but I got right on the phone with the Consumer Credit Protection department for my state. I explained the situation to them and they informed me that 500 Fast Cash isn't even licensed in my state, therefore, should not even be doing business with anyone who lives in my state. In fact, they told me that there are only 12 payday loan companies who ARE licensed in my state, and none of them are internet companies. They even gave me the state government web site that lists all of the licensed payday loan companies. Sure enough, there are only 12 and they are all local. The guy with Consumer Credit Protection even said that my only real option to get out of the whole mess would be to close by bank account and open up a new one, which I did yesterday. He said that if I didn't do that, he was 99.9% sure that they would just continue to debit my account and cost me a fortune. Here is my question: Should I contact 500 Fast Cash and tell them that I have found out directly from my state that they are not even licensed to do business here and tell them that I will be filing a complaint? I'm so mad about this, but even angrier with myself for dealing with any internet payday loan company. I will never do this again! I am looking for helpful answers. Please don't refer me to other payday loan companies or give me criticism for getting into this mess! This is the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life and I freely admit it! One more thing: If I do write them an e-mail to let them know that I found out about them not being licensed and that I plan to report them, should I give them my name and the so-called "account number" that they gave me so that they know who they are dealing with?

Dear Yahoo! Please reply to my question is to make sure that this letter came to my email every day and than? Dear Yahoo! Please reply to my question is to make sure that this letter came to my email every day and thank you very much This is the text of the message. United Kingdom National Lottery 101 Bovill Road, London SE23 1EL United Kingdom Ref #: EGS/2251256003/02 Congratulations, we are pleased to inform you of the result of the United Kingdom National Lottery. Your email address have been randomly selected as a beneficiary of ?600,000.00 GBP in the just concluded United Kingdom National Lottery Online program, the draw was held on 4th July, 2009 using a computerized balloting system of selection, we are however sorry for the delay in contacting you. The United Kingdom National Lottery is aimed and focused at global development and improvement of living standard across the world. Free ?77 Million Pounds shared including *four* Ten Million Pounds beneficiaries, and *fourteen* Millionaires plus thousands of other cash prizes. With several other beneficiaries from all over the world, India, France, Singapore, USA, United Kingdom, Spain, South America, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland and many more. We wish to express our sincere apologies for the late notification, this free award online program is been conducted bi-quarterly the United Kingdom National Lottery, this draw was conducted at the European Issuing Centre, you were selected from an exclusive list of 1,000,000,000 e-mail addresses of internet users from the following categories; consumers, professionals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer ballot search from the internet 'NO TICKETS OR DRAFTS WERE SOLD'. Your email address attached to Security Ref #: EGS/2251256003/02 with Serial number No: 002839 emerged as a beneficiary of Six Hundred Thousand Pounds (?600.000.00 GBP), therefore you are eligible to file claim for your as one of our lucky beneficiaries for the payout of your total sum after a thorough verification that will be conducted by our various credible financial institutions. This online program is precisely aimed at enhancing global support for development across the world, your email address falls within the First Category as such your file has been designated to Foreign Service Directorate, where the complete verification and payout will be conducted only if there are no exceptions during the claims process, to file your claim immediately please contact our Foreign Service Director Anderson Spencer with the following information: 1. Name in full----------------------------------------- 2. Full address----------------------------------------- 3. Phone/Fax------------------------------------------- 4. Occupation------------------------------------------ TO: Contact Agent: Mr. Anderson Spencer Foreign Services Directorate, Pacifico Sistemas Inform?ticos GmbH & Co. E-mail: zonalclaimsdesk001@w.cn Phone: +44 702 406 5192 (8am - 5pm GMT) Fax: +44-870 974 3683 NOTE: In order to benefit from this program, you are advised in your own best interest to file your claim not later than 7days days from the date of this notification to avoid disqualification; anybody under the age of 18 is automatically disqualified. Please include this Ref #: EGS/2251256003/02 in every of your correspondence with our Foreign Service Director Anderson Spencer. IMPORTANT: Solemn confidentiality should be ensured until successful remittance of your prize to you to avoid undue taking of advantage, unwarranted claim and abuse of program, any breach of confidentiality on the part of the beneficiary will result to automatic disqualification. Sincerely Yours, Mrs. Julie Van Hans, Executive Director. United Kingdom National Lottery.

Help!!! L'Oreal Product Advise? Can someone help me please! I need advise on 2 L'oreal products I purchased in Germany. Have been continually trying to contact L'oreal through their website but failed because Sri Lanka is not in their list. The messages failed to be sent to the consumer centre. I purchased these two products 1) Belebendes Gesichtswasser 2) Samtige Reinigungsmilch I asked for a face wash and a toner. This is what the sales person gave me. All instructions are in German. I have no clue how to use them. Could someone give me step by step instructions as to how I should use these? Or could someone give me an e-mail address for L'oreal - Germany or somewhere! Thanks!

Is this true and would you agree? * I Am Angry* * by Susan Fassanella <mailto:sfassanella@adelphia.net> by Susan Fassanella* Save a link to this article and return to it at www.savethis.comSave a link to this article and return to it at www.savethis.com <#> Email a link to this articleEmail a link to this article <#> Printer-friendly version of this articlePrinter-friendly version of this article <#> View a list of the most popular articles on our siteView a list of the most popular articles on our site <#> Dear Lew, the Honorable Ron Paul?s piece <http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul331.html> on why Americans are angry really stirred me to respond. Mr. Paul?s piece speaks about many issues facing Americans today. I am a 51-year-old woman. I have been married to the same man since 1976. I am the secretary/office manager for a small legal firm in the D.C. suburbs. My husband manages a wine and spirits store. I have two sons, aged 26 and 22. After realizing it wasn?t possible to support themselves and the government at the same time, both returned to the nuclear nest. Along with most people in my economic situation, I believe I am living what is supposed to be the American dream. I know why I am an angry American. I am frightened because America isn?t the same country it was when I was my children?s age. Allow me to share with you some of the reasons why I am an angry American. I am angry because my government has been taken over by liars, thieves, thugs, deviants, and micromanagers. The propaganda it produces rivals that of the most fascist dictatorship. I am angry that my government perceives my intelligence to be that of a jar of pickles incapable of making the smallest decision. I am angry that my government takes it upon itself to shove its clucking nose into my pantry, medicine chest, bedroom, family room, doctor?s office, workplace, and everywhere else it thinks I need guidance to keep me safe from myself. I am angry that the will of the American people is ignored on every issue imaginable. If voting really mattered, it would have been outlawed long ago. I am angry that I am called a conspiracy theorist because I dare to think on my own and question authority and its lies. I am angry that the more I read about 9-11 the more it looks like an inside job that was allowed to happen, enabling the Patriot Act to be conveniently enacted into law with the ensuing "war on terrah" following closely on its heels. I am angry that the evil puppets in power think laws are created for the peon masses and it is their right to ignore the ones that get in the way of their agenda. I am angry that the media has sold its soul to the evil forces running the world. I am angry that my "leaders" have taken to calling my country the "homeland." It reeks of socialism. I am angry that my government has invaded yet another sovereign nation and caused untold death and destruction based on a flimsy lie. I am expected to believe that weapons of mass destruction threatened my freedom and then I am told several years and billions of squandered dollars later that a massive intelligence network got the wrong information. A select group of businesses profit enormously from war. When Bush announced his intention to save Iraq from itself and that its oil would pay for the overthrow of Hussein, I laughed so hard I nearly choked. I remember the instability in the Middle East during the 1970s and the gas "shortages" that followed. I knew which direction gas prices would go. How stupid does Mr. Bush and his cronies think I am? I am angry that the world stands silently by while my government bombs foreign lands with weapons containing depleted uranium and the news magazines wonder on their front covers why lung cancer has increased six-fold in the last year. I am angry that Americans accept as gospel the propaganda that is routinely cranked out of the Washington lie machine. The lies become more transparent and brazen with each passing year, yet the only thing that seems to matter in living rooms across America is who will be the next American Idol. I am angry that I am punished with high energy and gas prices and the resulting inflation because tree-hugging terrorists masquerading as environmentalists have handcuffed my country?s ability to produce its own energy. It would be easy to tell the Middle East what to do with their oil if restrictions on exploration and production were lifted in our own backyard. I am angry that I am constantly admonished by minimalists for being a greedy consumer because I live where I choose, drive the vehicle of my choice, eat meat, and use tin foil to cover my leftovers. I am angry that my life doesn?t belong to me anymore. I am angry that I am required to obtain permission, fill out mandated paperwork in quadruplicate, and obtain the correct license or permit for just about everything imaginable. The tentacles of government are strangling my freedom, choice, and privacy at an alarming rate. The wrath of the machine is a constant threat should I dare do anything without leaving a neon paper trail and of course ignorance of the law is never an excuse. I am angry that property rights are a thing of the past thanks to court-approved eminent domain theft. I am angry that the Constitution is routinely declared irrelevant making it easier for a fascist police state and new world order to take over. I am angry that legislation is in the works that will require me to carry "papers" to "prove" who I am. Another coming law I will ignore. I am angry that my right to own and carry a firearm is drastically regulated and restricted. I am angry every time I see a young person detained on the side of the road while cops paw through their possessions looking for anything that could enable them to be arrested and dragged through the criminal justice system. This has become so commonplace it is now the accepted norm. I am angry that roadblocks are set up under the guise of keeping roads free of drunk drivers. What has happened to my right to travel freely? Why am I presumed guilty without probable cause? I am afraid to have a few drinks when I go out to dinner for fear I will be pulled over and end up in court-ordered drug rehabilitation. I am angry when I read stories of Americans terrorized in airports and treated like common criminals by government minions after they have paid for the right to travel within a private system, yet pilots are blocked from carrying firearms. I am angry that America has become a nation of busybodies. We are constantly bombarded with messages to be on the lookout for terrorists around every corner, report "suspicious activity," and rat on our neighbor whenever the opportunity presents itself. Is this not how the Nazis gained control of Germany and then most of Europe? I am angry that the government requires me to sign a form every time I purchase a prescription. Whose business is it that I choose to take a thyroid medication, an antibiotic, a painkiller, an appetite suppressant, or any other substance? Am I dying of cancer? Am I facing debilitating chronic pain? Do I simply want to get HIGH? Heaven forbid someone out there might get their hands on something that might make them FEEL GOOD! No substance should be illegal or unobtainable. If a person wishes to self-medicate, that is their right. The government should not be in the business of criminalizing personal choices of any kind as long as those choices don?t infringe on another?s rights. I am angry that my government meddles in the lives of people all over the world but looks the other way on the catastrophic issue of what to do about the millions of illegals who have crashed the gates of this nation. My country?s laws are ignored and mocked, yet I am told I must accept with open arms those who are here illegally. My taxes are used to educate their children in their native language. Hospitals are overrun with indigent people seeking medical care. Untaxed dollars earned in the underground economy are sent to the family back home while social services here are stretched to the limit. I read job want ads stating if you aren?t bilingual don?t bother to apply. What would happen to me if I placed an ad that said don?t bother to apply if your English isn?t understandable? Marches are conducted in my cities? streets waving their countries? flags as they shamelessly demand their "rights." I am told they deserve the same opportunities that brought my forefathers here. I am scolded that it is un-American to ask why they are not sent home. I am told that the term "illegal alien" offends them and that they prefer to be called "undocumented workers" and that my economy would die without them. I will happily pay more for fruits and vegetables if it means enforcing sensible immigration laws. But immigration isn?t about the cost of lettuce. It is another facet of an agenda that is bent on changing the face of America. When America is no longer a wealthy country of white European descent, it will be a place worse than anything Orwell could have imagined. I am angry that my country is the only nation on earth who declares that a baby born on its soil is automatically an American citizen. I am angry that the thugs that run my country don?t have the guts to declare English my nation?s official language. I am angry that I have to search a package for English and push a button on every telephone system and ATM machine to continue in English. I am angry that Washington, D.C.?s Metro is now being pressured to replace every station sign with bilingual verbiage to the tune of millions of dollars. Are bilingual road signs going to be the next mandated law of the land? I am currently forced to pay for voting ballots printed in 15 different languages and my tax dollars pay for interpreter services for people who are summoned to court for breaking laws. If English is the international language of the world, why isn?t it good enough to be the official language of the United States? I am angry when I am told I am a bigot when I thumb my nose at political correctness. I am angry when I wonder whether an expressed belief or opinion could land me in litigation if someone doesn?t like what I said and wants to silence my voice. I am angry that diversity and sensitivity training is being forced on people whose only crime is to dare to speak freely. I am angry that the symbols, customs, and roots of my Judeo-Christian country are being systematically outlawed because my culture offends newcomers. When we freely choose to go somewhere, are we not accepting the customs and cultures of that place? I am weary of being made to feel guilty for being an American. And finally, I am angry that after working my entire adult life, I don?t see retirement in my life?s picture. My husband and I earn over a hundred thousand dollars a year, but by the time we pay federal taxes, state taxes, social security taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, energy taxes, telecommunication taxes, savings taxes, fees, permits, etc., there isn?t much left. But please don?t think that I mind supporting every deadbeat and down-and-outer with his hand out for a piece of my pie that I worked so hard for. I love supporting the world. After all, it?s the American way, isn?t it? /July 5, 2006/ /Susan Fassanella [send her mail <mailto:sfassanella@adelphia.net>] was born in Washington, D.C. and resides in Frederick County, Maryland with her husband and two sons./ Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com Wow thank you for some of the wonderfull answers so far to those that responded. and to those that reacted with shallow niave judgements and dismissals, well go do some serious work on your comprehension of the world! keep them rolling in please ;)

How many receipt-less voting machines are used nation-wide?

how to verify that I won yahoo lottery or it is fraud/joke? Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:37:48 +0000 (GMT) From: "Halifax Bank Plc" <halifax.bankplc@yahoo.co.uk> Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert Yahoo! DomainKeys has confirmed that this message was sent by yahoo.co.uk. Learn more Subject: WELCOME TO HALIFAX BANK PLC (ATTENTION : Saqlain Tauraizue Ahmad) To: sakrez@yahoo.com Halifax Bank PLC 2 PARADISE STREET LIVERPOOL L1 8JF London Email: halifaxbankingonline@yahoo.co.uk info_halifaxbank@fbenv.net Tel;+44-704-570-9563 +44-701-115-0386 Fax: +447075055364 27th February, 2007 TRANSFER PROCESS Attn;Saqlain Tauraizue Ahmad, Good day to you my name is Mr. John Kerry and welcome to Halifax Bank PLC. Please be informed that a Cheque of the Yahoo Lottery Promo in the sum of $800,000.00 USD (Eight Hundred Thousand Us Dollars) in your name was delivered to us this morning by the Lottery Organization for online wire transfer. Please be informed that before we can proceed to transfer the fund, a transit account has to be activated/opened for you. It is this account that the said fund ($800,000.00) would be deposited. Once this account has been activated/opened, you would transfer online the said fund to any of your designated bank account across the globe. So you are therefore required to pay an account activation fee to open the transit account. All banks in the UK , including ours, are authorized and regulated by the Financial Services Authority and as a result, clients are required to abide by the Banking policies of the British Government by making security deposit for ACTIVATION FEES. The Financial Services Authority is the independent regulator set up by Government to look after the financial services industry and protect consumers. The activation fee is £300 Great British Pounds The United States Dollars Equivalent of this is $589.229 Note that we can not continue with the online bank transfer until the activation fees is paid because this said fund has to be deposited into an account before it can be transferred to you. This is in accordance with section 17(1) (n) of the National Online Transfer Act as adopted in 1998 and amended on 3rd July 2001 by Parliament. Note; that your total prizes claim has been insured to the real value and as such the ACTIAVTION FEE cannot be deducted from it. This is in accordance with section 13(n) of the national gambling acts as adopts this in 1993 and amended on 3RD July 1996. This is to protect winners and to avoid misappropriation of funds Payment for the activation fees can be made either via WESTERN UNION MONEY TRANSFER. On receipt of this email you are to contact us to provide you with details of our Accounts Manager to effect payment. Upon your reply and consent I would provide you with the necessary details to effect payment for the 'ACTIVATION FEE" Yours Faithfully, Mr. John Kerry Account Officer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. DeleteReplyForwardSpamMove... Previous | Next | Back to Messages Save Message Text | Full Headers Check MailCompose Search Mail: Search MailSearch the Web Move Options [New Folder] CHENAB Forward Options As Inline Text As Attachment Reply Options Reply To Sender Reply To Everyone Mail Shortcuts Check Mail Ctrl++C Compose Ctrl++P Folders Ctrl++F Advanced Search Ctrl++S Options Help Ctrl++H Address Book Shortcuts Add Contact Add Category View Contacts View Lists QuickBuilder Import Contacts Synchronize Addresses Options Addresses Help Calendar Shortcuts Add Event Add Task Add Birthday Day Week Month Year Event List Reminders Tasks Sharing Synchronize Calendar Options Calendar Help Notepad Shortcuts Add Note Add Folder View Notes Notepad Options Notepad Help Advanced Search Advanced Search

What does this scripting mean and whenever I upload it to my webpage it doesnt work please help? Configuration Section # Edit these variables! local %config; # The Base Directory. We need an # absolute path for the base directory. # Include the trailing slash. THIS SHOULD # NOT BE WEB-ACCESSIBLE! $config{'basepath'} = '/home/hahnfld/auctiondata/'; # Closed Auction Directory # This is where closed auction items are stored. # Leave this blank if you don't want to store # closed auctions. It can potentially take # up quite a bit of disk space. $config{'closedir'} = 'closed'; # User Registration Directory # This is where user registrations are stored. # Leave this blank if you don't want to # require registration. It can potentially # take up quite a bit of disk space. $config{'regdir'} = 'reg'; # List each directory and its associated # category name. These directories should # be subdirectories of the base directory. %category = ( computer => 'Computer Hardware and Software', elec => 'Consumer Electronics', other => 'Other Junk', ); # This is the password for deleting auction # items. $config{'adminpass'} = 'auction'; # You need to assign either a mail program or # a mail host so confirmation e-mails can # be sent out. # Leave one commented and one uncommented. # # YOU NEED EITHER A MAIL PROGRAM # $config{'mailprog'} = '/usr/lib/sendmail -t'; # # OR YOU NEED A MAIL HOST (SMTP) $config{'mailhost'} = 'localhost'; # This line should be your e-mail address $config{'admin_address'} = 'nobody@yourhost.com'; # This line should point to the URL of # your server. It will be used for sending # "you have been outbid" e-mail. The script # name and auction will be appended to the # end automatically, so DO NOT use a trailing # slash. If you do not want to send outbid # e-mail, leave this blank. $config{'scripturl'} = 'www.your.host.com'; # This will let you define colors for the # tables that are generated and the # other page colors. The default colors # create a nice "professional" look. Must # be in hex format. $config{'colortablehead'} = '#BBBBBB'; $config{'colortablebody'} = '#EEEEEE'; # Site Name (will appear at the top of each page) $config{'sitename'} = 'Your Site Name Here'; # You can configure your own header which will # be appended to the top of each page. $config{'header'} =<<"EOF"; <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>$config{'sitename'} - Powered By EveryAuction</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY TEXT=#000000 BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF LINK=#000088 VLINK=#000088 ALINK=#000088> <TABLE WIDTH=100\% BORDER=0><TR><TD VALIGN=TOP WIDTH=100\%> <FONT SIZE=+2>$config{'sitename'}</FONT> <BR> <FONT SIZE=+1>Online Auction</FONT> </TD><TD VALIGN=TOP ALIGN=LEFT> <FORM ACTION=$ENV{'SCRIPT_NAME'} METHOD=POST> <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME=searchstring> <INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE="Search"> <INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME=action VALUE="search"> <FONT SIZE=-2><INPUT TYPE=RADIO NAME=searchtype VALUE="keyword" CHECKED>keyword <INPUT TYPE=RADIO NAME=searchtype VALUE="username">username </FONT> </FORM> </TD></TR></TABLE> <P> EOF # You can configure your own footer which will # be appended to the bottom of each page. # Although not required, a link back to # everysoft.com will help to support future # development. $config{'footer'} =<<"EOF"; <P> <CENTER><FONT SIZE=-1><I>Powered By <A HREF=http://www.everysoft.com/auction/>EveryAuction 1.53</A></I></FONT></CENTER> </BODY> </HTML> EOF # Sniper Protection... How many minutes # past last bid to hold auction. If auctions # should close at exactly closing time, set # to zero. $config{'aftermin'} = 5; # File locking enabled? Should be 1 (yes) # for most systems, but set to 0 (no) if you # are getting flock errors or the script # crashes. $config{'flock'} = 1; # User Posting Enabled- 1=yes 0=no $config{'newokay'} = 1;

HELP I think I was just scam??? Can anyone please help? Hi, I currently feel that I was scam on May 6 2008 by a telemarketer this afternoon after I received a phone call around 5:38 PM from a company I believe called the National Magazine Company or Century Marketing (Phone # 1-866-457-8860) in Utah. First, a young woman told me I have been entered in Dreams Come true Sweepstakes, and that MC, Visa; American Express entered all their cardholders in this sweepstakes. Grand prize is 25,000, Diamond Watch and a trip. She asked me if I was a cardholder. I said yes, then gave me the confirmation code C208. Then she told me that she was transfer me to her supervisor and he said I would receive had 5 magazines for just $3.95 a week for 25 months. He also assured me that within 3 days I would receive a welcome package with a complete listing of magazines should I decide I wanted different ones in the mail. Plus, they said that I would be able to cancel the orders at that time if I wish. After a while, I got suspicious as the call went on so I hung up. He called right back however I did not pick up the first time but I picked up the second time and told him I want to cancel everything and he said I can’t and kept telling me to finish the process. He offered to lower the price but I told him I can’t because I have too much college expensive (I am a full-time college student in NYC) to pay and I am not working but he said I have to finish, it went on and on by him telling me I have to stay with it. So I decided to hang up again this time I didn't pick up when he called again. Keep in mind I didn’t finish the so call process. However I did give him my debit card account number by mistake and expatriation date but I didn’t give him my security code on the back of one’s card or PIN or my SSN. I would really appreciate it if you can help me know what my statuses now of being scam and what should I do. P.S. Once I hang-up I cancel my debit card right away around 6:00 PM the same day also I just recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection around 10:30 PM about this particular company or organization. What else can I do?? Is there anything else I can do? I have one more question what if they mail me stuff (welcome package)? What should i do then?...Thank-you all for your help and time. I know I made a mistake but I learn my lesson. Also so far the bank failed a case against them since they tried to take money out, they said everything should be fix by Friday if so. I mean *Filed a case

where can I get a free mailing list? I need a mailing list of at least 200 consumers in the U.S. Could someone please send me one, or tell me where I can get one???? Thank-you

It is a correct yahoo promotion? dear Admin, I got below email under name yahoo UK for "Lottery promotion organized by Yahoo Incorporated for the introduction of all new Yahoo mail beta and Yahoo male classic" , it's a correct promotion from Yahoo or just a cyber crime ? Thank you and regards, susan_1721@yahoo.com ======================================================== CONGRATULATIONS YOUR EMAIL I D WON OUR PRIZE £275,000.00 POUNDS Wednesday, November 19, 2008 6:33 AM From: "YAHOO INCORPORATED" Add sender to Contacts To: undisclosed-recipients Yahoo! News - Lottery Yahoo! UK and Ireland Welcome to the official site of Yahoo Lottery Inc. The Online Consumer Promotions 2008 Send email message CONGRATULATIONS! European Region Office: 10B Canada Square, London HP1 8HFD, England. U.K. Barr Joe Blubleburg Executive Co-coordinator Yahoo lottery Inc TELE:+44 70359 32156 Yahoo! Lottery Online coordinator , Sweepstakes International Program. Copyright (c)2008 Yahoo Lottery CONGRATULTIONS!!!!! YAHOO LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL WINNER NO.3 This is to inform you that your email have won a prize money of two hundred and seventy five thousand United Kingdom pounds ( £275,000.00 ) in a Lottery promotion organized by Yahoo Incorporated for the introduction of all new Yahoo mail beta and Yahoo male classic. Yahoo! arranged and gathered all the e-mail addresses of the people that are active online, among the millions that subscribed to Yahoo mail and other related email that been powered by Yahoo. We only selected ten (10) subscribers as our winners through electronic balloting system (E.B.S) without the person applying as long as you are making use of your email id. We congratulate you for being one of the people selected winner. Payment /claim procedure: Your payment approval file sent to London due to we have 3 lucky winners in UK so that you can be cleared and paid simultaneously there with them. You are to contact our UK head office director international credit department for your date of claim. Contact person: Dr. James Williams (director international credit department ) Contact email: fountaincourts@gmail.com / fountaincourts@list.ru Tele: +44 70457 75349 Your Yahoo Prize must be claimed not later than 14 working days from date of draw notification after the draw date in which prize has won. Note: Any price not claim within this period (14 working days) will be forfeited. These are your identification numbers: Ref number........................YBM/07207/EBS Winning number.................YBM/11050/EBS Batch number.........YBM/00101/EBS These numbers above fall within the United Kingdom Agent Location file, you are requested to contact Dr. James Williams and send your Identification Numbers and Personal Information to Him to facilitate them and process your indenmity file for immediate payment. Send your Identification Numbers/Your Personal Information to Him immediately: 1. Full name.................. 2. Country.................... 3. Contact Address........... 4. Telephone Number......... 5. Marital Status.............. 6. Occupation.................. 7. Age.......................... 8. Sex......................... Indicate your choice of receiving your won prize below Bank to Bank Wire Transfer (Account to Account wire trnsafer) Courier Delivery Via Certified bank draft/Cheque Your won prize will be sent to you via any of this two option above. Only the winner has the right/authority to cash this bank draf/cheque, any where In the world hence he/she is confirm the legitimate owner and the lucky email id. You have to keep your Batch no, Ref no, and Winning No privately and confidential to avoid double claim or unwarranted abuse. Any abuse of this lottery may result to disqualification or cancellation of your prize. Note: As this lottery program is highly influence by United Nations in International lottery program, the won price will not be tamper in any way until the beneficiary procure the required documents and signed for claim before Yahoo representative in country during delivery. Good luck in contacting your claim agent. Yours in service, Barr Joe Blubleburg Executive Co-coordinator, Yahoo lottery Inc Dr. P. Swier, Mr. Gerald Goodman (Manager Foreign Operations) Mr. Franklyn Van Der Weijden (Manager Domestic Banking Operations) Dr. James Williams (Director International Credit Department) Barr Mrs. Sandra Murphy (Executive), Mr. Michael Cole (Executive) Mr. Stephen Boer (Chairman). Web Hosting Hosted by Yahoo! Web Hosting Hosted by Yahoo! Web Hosting If you have questions or wish to claim your prize money kindly contact this email fountaincourts@gmail.com , see the instructions the body of this message Yahoo! UK and Ireland

Anyone want some cool freebies? So that's my question.. also, does anyone know of any you can add to my enormous list? LOL! Today in CT we had some yucky damp weather and I took advantage of an indoor day and spent several hours scouring the internet for free samples! Some of them may not be for you but I included them anyway; you can pick and choose what you want. I just wanted to share them with all of you. Enjoy!!! Act quickly though, these things tend to go quick! BTW, I'm not sure how they work from foreign countries - I'm in the US. Cheers! Freebies (12 March 2009) - Oh! And you may want to cut and paste this whole thing before some jerk gets it deleted. I just wanted to share the wealth! Cheers all!!! I would recommend the first thing you do before signing up for all these samples you set up an alias email address so you don’t end up with your regular email box full of spam! Trust me, you’ll be glad you did! But make sure you make note of the name and password because some of the samples require you to go in and reply to a confirmation email before you get the free goods. BTW, I have about 40 others but Y!A will only allow me to include 10 links. If anyone wants the other links for freebies, feel free to email me. For free samples of Members Mark (Sams Club brand) Regular Milk-Based or Gentle (or both) formulas http://www.membersmarkformula.com/free_sample.aspx And direct from Parents Choice’s Website (I think you can order both types from both sites if you want). http://www.parentschoiceformula.com/sample-milk-baby-formula.aspx This one is for the older kiddies. Chuck E Cheese – Free tokens for good grades on your child’s report card. http://www.chuckecheese.com/promotions/tokens.php I signed up for this one a few years ago and Baskin Robbins does send you coupons for discounts on cakes and a FREE ice cream cone on your birthday! Mmmmm… Now I’m going to sign up Avary too (and guess who gets the leftovers, Ha-ha-ha…my evil plan!) http://www.baskinrobbins.com/ This is a form you fill out and mail in to join “Denny's Kids' Birthday Club.” They will mail your child (under 10 years old) a coupon for a free meal or dessert! http://www.dennys.com/LiveImages/enProductImage_334.pdf Certificate for a free can of your choice of an Enfamil Formula (Nutramigen® LIPIL®, Enfamil® Gentlease® LIPIL®, Enfamil® A.R.® LIPIL®) You just print the certificate and bring it to your ped. Apparently you can get one free can every time you visit your ped! That’s what it says at the bottom, anyway. http://www.enfamil.com/app/iwp/enfamil/certificate.do?dm=enf&id=/Consumer_Home2/Enf_Tools_Resources/Enf_Programs_Offers/NGARsample&iwpst=B2C&ls=0&csred=1&r=3410473124 Free Juicy Juice Sippy Cup (I got mine in just a couple weeks) - but it's still active. http://www.juicyjuice.com/SpecialOffers/Default.aspx Free Mommy To Be Wristband. I wish I had this when I was pregnant! http://www.babiesonline.com/wristband/index2b.asp This site has a quiz for you to complete (answers are d,d,c,b,d,d,c,d,d,b) and they will send you a packet of coupons and all kinds of organic info, etc. http://www.ebfarm.com/AboutUs/HealthyFamilies/HealthyChildQuiz.aspx And for all the dads out there! A free sample of Aveda Hair care product (You will get a coupon to print out and bring to and Aveda store. I love an excuse to go to Aveda!) and even an e-thank you card you can send to your man and thank him for doing all those little things he should be doing anyway! http://www.avedathanksman.com/ IIf anyone knows of any others I haven't listed, please feel free to share! I'm becoming a bit obsessed with free samples, LOL! Hey, everyone needs a hobby, right - LOL! Have fun!!! -Atlas_junkie AKA: Avary's mommy

Where can I purchase email mailing lists? Looking to purchase a high-quality email list of consumers in the U.S. USAData, InfoUSA, SalesGenie do not sell email lists. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

How many receipt-less voting machines are used nation-wide?

RECALL of PET FOOD - why would they delete my question? How can they say they want a "safe and useful community" and send me this in an e-mail? "You have posted content to Yahoo! Answers in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. As a result, your content has been deleted. Community Guidelines help to keep Yahoo! Answers a safe and useful community, so we appreciate your consideration of its rules. Deleted Question: RECALL dog & cat massive pet food recall, kidney failure, death, please check your pantry? Question Details: MANY DIFFERENT BRANDS, CANS & POUCHES, CAT & DOG FOODS A complete list of the recalled products along with product codes, descriptions and production dates was available from the Menu Foods Web site — http://www.menufoods.com/recall — and consumers also could call (866) 463-6738. If you feel this content was removed in error, please contact Customer Care and tell us why. Regards, Yahoo! Customer Care ?

Sounds to be true?????What do you think? I received an email: THE PEPSI COMPANY OFFICIAL PRIZE NOTIFICATION. We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded annual final draws held October 2007 by Pepsi in conjunction with the European Gaming Prize Consumer Award Promotion, your email was among the 20 Lucky winners who won E1,500,000.00 (One Million, Five hundred Thousand Euros) each on the; THE PEPSI COMPANY LOTTERY PROMOTION. However, your email was attached to ticket number (000000) and ballot ticket number 000000). The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 25,000,000 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet. However, no tickets were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different ticket numbers for representation and privacy. In other to claim your E1,500,000.00 (One Million, Five ....fill up the .......

Does one need a degree to become a CEO ? I say No .? Success Without a College Degree? Six Hot Shots Who Made It Kate Lorenz, CareerBuilder.com Editor Many think the only way to succeed is through education. While piling on the degrees can earn you piles of dough -- and debt -- it's not the only option. Some of today's most successful people don't have a college degree. But what they lack in academic credentials, they make up for in tenacity, brains, guts and strong business sense. Richard Branson In 1970, Richard Branson founded Virgin as a mail order record retailer, and not long afterward he opened a record shop in London. Two years later, the first Virgin artist, Mike Oldfield, recorded "Tubular Bells." Since then many household names, including Ben Harper, Fatboy Slim, Perry Farrell, Gorillaz, Lenny Kravitz, Janet Jackson and The Rolling Stones have helped to make Virgin Music one of the top record companies in the world. Branson sold the equity of Virgin Music Group -- record labels, music publishing and recording studios -- in 1992 in a $1 billion deal, but he remains chairman of Virgin Group, which today includes Virgin Atlantic, Books, Games, LifeCare, Limousines, Megastores and Hotels. Barry Diller Barry Diller started his career in the mail room of the William Morris Agency after dropping out of UCLA after one semester. He was hired by ABC in 1966 where he created the ABC Movie of the Week, pioneering the concept of the made-for-television movie. At age 32, he became president of Paramount Pictures, which produced a string of successful television shows (Laverne and Shirley, Taxi, Cheers) and feature films (Saturday Night Fever, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Beverly Hills Cop) under his helm. From 1984 to 1992, he was chairman and CEO of Fox Studios and was responsible for creating the Fox Broadcasting Company. Today, Diller is the chairman of Expedia and the chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which includes Citysearch, Evite, Home Shopping Network, Lending Tree, Match.com and Ticketmaster . Matt Drudge Pundit, blogger and radio personality Matt Drudge is best known as the proprietor of the Drudge Report Web site. "The only good grades I got in school were for current events," he has said of his education. Drudge opted out of college and floated among a number of odd jobs including convenience store clerk, book salesman and grocery store sales assistant. In 1989, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job in the gift shop of CBS studios, eventually working his way up to manager. The inside scoop he learned while in this position was allegedly part of the inspiration for founding his gossip rag The Drudge Report. The tabloid made gained notoriety when it was the first to break the news of a relationship between White House intern Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton in 1998. Janus Friis Named to Time Magazine's 2006 list of 100 most influential people, Janus Friis holds no formal education. He worked at the help desk of CyberCity, one of Denmark's first ISPs and later worked at Tele2, the leading alternative consumer oriented pan-European telecom operator. It was at Tele2 where Friis met Niklas Zennström, with whom he co-founded the file-sharing application KaZaA and Skype, the peer-to-peer telephony application. In early 2006, Friis and Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion. Rachael Ray Rachael Ray's career started at Macy's department store, first at the candy counter and then as the manager of the fresh foods department. Ray quickly followed with stints in gourmet markets and restaurants in New York. At gourmet food market Cowan & Lobel, she began a series of cooking classes -- 30 Minute Meals. Those classes became so popular that she was soon doing weekly segments for the evening news. Today, Ray is an Emmy-winning television personality who hosts a nationally syndicated talk show and four different programs the Food Network, publishes her own magazine, and has written multiple cookbooks. Jeff Valdez Named one of AdAge's Marketing 50 in 2005, Jeff Valdez grew up the youngest of nine children in a housing project in Pueblo, Colorado. As a young adult, he moved through several jobs and ended up as a drummer with a lounge band called Wildfire. Valdez later returned to Colorado after about 10 years of touring and opened a comedy club where he did stand-up. In 1990, he threw his hat into the political ring and made a failed bid for mayor of Colorado Springs. But in 2004, he launched Si TV, the first all-English language network targeting a Hispanic audience. Anna Wintour Best identified by her trademark sunglasses and pageboy hairstyle, Anna Wintour is an icon of the fashion world. She reportedly attended North London Collegiate School, but never graduated. She started in 1970 working in the fashion department of Harpers and Queen in London. In 1976, she was named fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar, followed by a brief stint at New York Magazine, three years as creative director of American Vogue, and finally named editor of British Vogue in 1986. In 1998, she became editor-in-chief of American Vogue. Wintour's work style is so notorious, the novel "The Devil Wears Prada" and its subsequent motion picture are said to be based on her. In recent years, she's focused on many philanthropic endeavors including raising more than $10 million for AIDS, putting Vogue's support behind women-owned businesses in Kabul, Afganistan, and promoting various post-9/11 campaigns. Sources: Virgin Group Web site, "Tavis Smiley" on PBS, FoodTV.com, Washington Post Company Web site, Museum of Broadcast Communications, Time.com, BusinessWeek.com, Hispanictrends.com, Skype.com, Vogue.com

How many receipt-less voting machines are used nation-wide?

Political emmergency and bail out by bush demanded & court action filed u s district court HI 10.14 08:kROY? 10.14.2008 new york Yahoo! ServicesYahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services News Sports Finance EntertainmentMake Y! My Home Page Account OptionsHi, newtondale@rocket...Edit My Account You are signed in as: newtondale@rocket... My Profile Sign Out HelpYahoo! SearchSearch web search Ask Answer Discover Search for questions: Advanced My Profile Home > Ask Your Question 2 Categorize your question Categorize your question Dale N_democracy us_development? Your Question political bailout of jungle democratic US demanded by hon gw Bush. corrupt elec campaign pres threat us:const? U s a polical parties dominated by gop and democratic parties is failing safeguard us constitution and usa as a nation, illegal and undocumented person as alleged in 125 u s district courts were fied by lawful gop hopeful and fec washington dc regd on sept 27 2007 viz the reverend dr kamal karna karuna roy aka &was born as joseph geronimo jr in u s territory in pacific island, guam, a gop registered in franklin county in upstate new york, a specailist mba, usa school,ph d, d, ll b from foeign schools with advance cert of accomplishment in public admn from u s d a graduate school, washington dc,1972, id 578804399; author of books including viz "Jungle democracies, Cat and Mouse doctrines of oppression on weaker peple , nation, entities, alien nations, aliens and illegal aliens viz obama et al in usa by most of powerfuls, people, entities and nations and superpowers vix usa, russia, china , petty would be powerful like india, pakistan korea et al: although ther is no evidence that usa is an oppressive nation al all , although may be majority populations in billions of people outside usa do opine that usa may be equally oppressive to weaker population in world outside & domestic usa. that illegal and undocumented person like aladins with magic lamp is invading the white house and u s presidency 2008. Mccain og gop has had native birth problem of u s birth requirement for u s presidency, gop and democrats and govt wing fec, washington dc failed to organize fair campaign of u s president 2008 schedule poll of november, Bailout plan should include removal of chairmen of F EC, Washington dc, gop and democratic parties immediately as they failed democratic election process 2008 , u s president, Hon george w bush postpone u s president election 08 and advise u s house of representative and senate appoint temporary u s president and vice president w e f 1.20. 2009 who with advice and roles may schedule next u s pres election in suitable non corrupt envionment of usa. usa may propose a non voting member of national political parties. the bail out plan shall upkeep usa freedom and not falling in trp of alien obama to loss of freedom of usa with presidential dictator shi of a person vis b h Obama reportely was born blacxk alien british, and British imperial rule coming as disguise. material was borrowed from ethics of rebel would be candidate/hopeful for the us presidency nesxt 2008 or otherl Based on your question, we think it belongs in one of these categories: Suggested Category Browse Categories Suggested Category Politics & Government > Politics Politics & Government > Government Politics & Government > Elections Politics & Government > General - Politics & Government News & Events > Current Events Or, select a different category from our complete list. Select a category using our category browser below or view Suggested Categories. Arts & Humanities ›Beauty & Style ›Business & Finance ›Cars & Transportation ›Computers & Internet ›Consumer Electronics ›Dining Out ›Education & Reference ›Entertainment & Music ›Environment ›Family & Relationships ›Food & Drink ›Games & Recreation ›Health ›Home & Garden ›Local Businesses ›News & Events ›Pets ›Politics & Government ›Pregnancy & Parenting ›Science & Mathematics ›Social Science ›Society & Culture ›Sports ›Travel ›Yahoo! Products › Select a category NotificationsNotifications E-mail me when I receive a new answer Add this question to my messenger status Make sure your question follows the community guidelines. Preview Previous Tip: Choosing the right category helps others find your question. Answers International Argentina Australia Brazil Canada China France Germany Hong Kong India Indonesia Italy Japan Malaysia Mexico New Zealand Philippines Quebec Singapore South Korea Spain Taiwan Thailand United Kingdom United States Vietnam en Español Yahoo! does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any Yahoo! Answers content. Click here for the Full Disclaimer. Help us improve Yahoo! Answers. Tell us what you think. Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All Rights Reserved. Copyright/IP Policy - Privacy Policy - Terms of Service - Community Guidelines - Safety Tips

is this a scam or job i cant even tell anymore? Mystery Shoppers-Rate Local Retail Stores - Shop & Keep $1000 Worth-Limited Applicants Needed! To: "bundaa420@yahoo.com" <bundaa420@yahoo.com> TopSpotBrands Today's Special Alerts Well Here is Your Chance To Go On A Shopping Spree For Free! Get $1000 Cash For Free To Be a Mystery or Secret Shopper In Your Home Area! You can secret shop stores in your area and keep the things you buy! Our Sponsor has limited budget for this secret shopper program! We need you to shop at stores like Best Buy, Walmart, Kmart, Macy's, Saks 5th Ave and so on and report back to our sponsor your shopping experience as to service, product availability, Item,s of interest on sale and so on All You Have To Do Is Press below to see if this opportunity is available in your area & initially complete a short member incentive program to see if you would qualify to Collect the $1000 For Free! Don't waste your time before our sponsor still has money for this program! Press here to see if the $1000 Shopping Spree is available to you! This is an advertisement. Promotion sponsored exclusively by Retail Report Card and is subject to terms and conditions. See website for complete details. Participation eligibility is restricted to legal US residents 18 and over. Retail Report Card is an independent rewards program and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any of the listed products, retailers, or manufacturers. Trademarks, service marks, logos and domain names are the property of their respective owners. To remove: producttestpanel.com/unsub.php and input your email address, or write to us at Consumer Research Corporation 3830 Forest Drive, Suite 207, Columbia, SC 29204. The submission of false, misleading or inaccurate information shall void this offer. Offer not valid to residents of Washington state, and is void where prohibited by law. To Remove: remove.topspotbrands.com or send a postal mail to: Top Spot Brands, 1636 3rd Ave., New York, NY 10128 now last time i did this turned out to be a scam and now the bank has shutted me out of thier system for 4-5 years because the check was fake.

How many receipt-less voting machines are used nation-wide?

RECALL of PET FOOD - why would they delete my question? How can they say they want a "safe and useful community" and send me this in an e-mail? "You have posted content to Yahoo! Answers in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. As a result, your content has been deleted. Community Guidelines help to keep Yahoo! Answers a safe and useful community, so we appreciate your consideration of its rules. Deleted Question: RECALL dog & cat massive pet food recall, kidney failure, death, please check your pantry? Question Details: MANY DIFFERENT BRANDS, CANS & POUCHES, CAT & DOG FOODS A complete list of the recalled products along with product codes, descriptions and production dates was available from the Menu Foods Web site — http://www.menufoods.com/recall — and consumers also could call (866) 463-6738. If you feel this content was removed in error, please contact Customer Care and tell us why. Regards, Yahoo! Customer Care ?

1. To bring buyers and sellers closer is the primary function of which of the following? 1. To bring buyers and sellers closer is the primary function of which of the following options? a. Import agents b. Export agents c. Brokers d. Manufacturer's sales offices 2. Which of the following is NOT a key activity in logistics? a. Materials handling b. Inventory control c. Production d. Warehousing 3. A convenience product is probably be sold by using which of the following distributions? a. Intensive distribution b. Exclusive distribution c. Selective distribution d. Extensive distribution 4. A reduction from the list price given to channel members based on the job they perform, reflects which one of the following discounts? a. Seasonal discount b. Quantity discount c. Trade discount d. Cash discount 5. Setting low prices to encourage initial product trial and to generate sales growth reflects which one of the following pricing methods? a. Penetration pricing b. Skimming pricing c. Competition-Based Pricing d. Cost-Based Pricing 6. Which of the following are NOT examples of intermediaries? a. Clients b. Dealers c. Agents d. Retailers 7. A marketer who wanted to include detailed explanations in advertisements would be most likely to use which one of the following media? a. Radio b. Television c. Outdoor displays d. Magazines 8. Which of the following is the first step in creating effective advertising messages— deciding what general message will be communicated to consumers? a. Deciding advertising clutter b. Message strategy c. Rewarding consumers d. Selecting the medium 9. Personal selling can be defined as which of the following communication? a. People communication b. Direct communication c. Interpersonal communication d. Local communication 10. An effective form of direct marketing today is using the 30-minute television advertising programs for a single product refers to which of the following options? a. Direct-Mail Marketing b. Home shopping TV c. Infomercials d. Publicity

How can email spammers get a dose of their own medicine when the unsubscribe option doesnt work? I am baffled at how spammers get access to my email address. I diligently click on the unsubscribe option at the bottom of each email. However most of the time they are from the same organization promising to remove your email from their list. I am left to wonder if it is even worth the trouble of consistently doing this. Moreover some emails dont even have that option. I sometimes wish there is a forum or website out there in the WWW where it is possible to add email addresses shown where the message is coming from or where these phishers ask unassuming consumers to reply to in the hopes that once enrolled they may get their own spam mails and clog their own networks. Am I alone in this plight?

RECALL of PET FOOD - why would they delete my question? RECALL of PET FOOD - why would they delete my question? How can they say they want a "safe and useful community" and send me this in an e-mail? "You have posted content to Yahoo! Answers in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. As a result, your content has been deleted. Community Guidelines help to keep Yahoo! Answers a safe and useful community, so we appreciate your consideration of its rules. Deleted Question: RECALL dog & cat massive pet food recall, kidney failure, death, please check your pantry? Question Details: MANY DIFFERENT BRANDS, CANS & POUCHES, CAT & DOG FOODS A complete list of the recalled products along with product codes, descriptions and production dates was available from the Menu Foods Web site — http://www.menufoods.com/recall... — and consumers also could call (866) 463-6738. If you feel this content was removed in error, please contact Customer Care and tell us why. Regards, Yahoo! Customer Care " ?