A pilot for ExpressJet Airlines refused to submit to a full-body scan in Memphis on Saturday, saying the technology amounts to “virtual strip searching.” Detained by airport security, he now may lose his job. Here’s his heroic first-hand account. Michael Roberts says he has been reporting for work in Memphis for 4 1/2 years without incident until Friday, the first time that the Transportation... 

It may not be politically correct to say it, but most Americans think the country’s gotten too PC and see that as a problem. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% of Adults believe America today has become too politically correct, while just 23% say the country is not politically correct enough. Eleven percent (11%) say the balance is about right. Some people think that... 

Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I.'s general counsel, has said the government is trying to prevent its existing surveillance power from eroding. Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say. The... 

Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old computer salesman and community college student, took his car in for an oil change earlier this month and his mechanic spotted an odd wire hanging from the undercarriage. The wire was attached to a strange magnetic device that puzzled Afifi and the mechanic. They freed it from the car and posted images of it online, asking for help in identifying it. Two days later, FBI... 

Microsoft is vastly expanding its efforts to prevent governments from using software piracy inquiries as a pretext to suppress dissent. It plans to provide free software licenses to more than 500,000 advocacy groups, independent media outlets and other nonprofit organizations in 12 countries with tightly controlled governments, including Russia and China. With the new program in place, authorities... 

Rep. Ron Paul brought a crowd at the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention to its feet October 9th, delivering a fiery speech about an “intellectual revolution.” He said the economy is going “to get a lot worse before it gets better” and advocated getting rid of the IRS and the income tax.  Read More »

Varugan Amroyan is led in handcuffs from FBI headquarters in New York Wednesday, Oct, 13, 2010. Amroyan is one of 73 people across the country charged by federal prosecutors in a scheme to cheat Medicare out of $163 million, the largest fraud by one criminal enterprise in the program's history, U.S. authorities said Wednesday. A vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates used phantom... 

A patient with a spinal cord injury was injected with human stem cells—marking the start of the first clinical trial of a human stem-cell therapy, one that could potentially help paralyzed people walk and control certain bodily functions. US researchers have started the first official trial use of human embryonic stem cells in treating patients with spinal injury after FDA officials gave them the... 

Google is positioned to be a major investor in a proposed transmission line for offshore wind farms on the Atlantic seaboard, a bold plan that could radically reshape the electrical grid in the region. The proposed Atlantic Wind Connection, which would cost $5 billion in all, would run from New Jersey to Norfolk, VA, collecting energy from offshore windfarms and redistributing it among mid-Atlantic... 

Google’s project to design driverless vehicles raised several questions about the future of driving. But it also raised a more topical question: Are Google’s heavily-modified driverless vehicle prototypes even legal? We found out. Researchers have been working on driverless vehicles since the late 1970s; European governments spent nearly $1 billion in the 1980s and ’90s on automated... 

There is a sense of national pride when a world-wide innovation is created in the U.S. Advertising that emphasizes a product is “Made in America” plays to that national pride, and it seems to have results. Three in five Americans (61%) say they are more likely to purchase something when the ad touts it is “Made in America” and only 3% say they are less likely to buy it. Just... 

A conspiracy theorist noticed that an image in NASA’s Astronomy Picture Of The Day had noticeable Photoshop brushstrokes in it, when you turned up the contrast. Is there a mysterious object hiding near Saturn’s moons? Check out the official image of Dione and Titan, above. A YouTube user named DominatorPS3 turned up the contrast on the image, and discovered brush strokes. You can just... 

The United States believes the rebalancing of the global economy “is not progressing as well as needed,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, pictured on October 6, told world economic leaders Friday. The specter of a damaging global currency war hung over a meeting of economic powers in Washington Friday, as China and the United States again clashed over efforts to rebalance world trade. Finance... 

An employee of Akamai, one of the world’s largest Internet content delivery providers, was arrested and charged with wire fraud after he allegedly tried to sell confidential company data to a foreign government. Elliot Doxer, 42, of Brookline, MA, worked in Akamai’s finance department where he had access to customer information, contracts and invoices. According to the authorities, in... 

Bee colonies across the country are dying because of colony collapse disorder, and researchers say a combination of a virus and a fungus could be playing a key role in the bees' sickness. There’s a lot of buzz in the scientific community about a new study linking the collapse of honeybee colonies to a fungus and insect virus first seen in Asian bees. “Our data suggests that these two...