A widely used electronic voting machine has been decertified in California, after tests confirmed it sometimes deleted groups of ballots without counting them.

 A co-founder and director of the Election Defense Alliance, Dan Ashby says this latest setback for electronic voting machines is further confirmation of their dubious reliability.

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Oil companies are consolidating and reaping record profits. And that's not a good thing, for democracy or for planet earth.

Antonia Juhasz' previous book was The Bu$h Agneda:  Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.

It's not the cost of oil at the derrick that has been driving up the price of gasoline at the pump, says researcher, analyst and writer Antonia Juhasz. A far more influential factor is the speculative trading of oil price futures, which happens outside the view or regulatory control of this or any other government.

While most big oil companies have recently begun to portray themselves as newly sensitive to the environment and open to alternative energy, Juhasz isn't buying it.

The current economic downturn may take years to level out, predicts a local analyst, but in the short term, over-extended homeowners have some new options to protect their properties.

Sebastopol journalist  Steve  Pizzo was a co-author of this critically acclaimed expose of the savings and loan scandals of the early 1990s. Today's economic woes are sometimes described as a meltdown, a metaphor that he says is disturbingly accurate.

One reason we see so many home satellite dishes on rooftops around us is that there's no easy way to get rid of them.

Recycling unwanted satellite dishes is still easier than destroying them, as these Iranian soldiers are trying to do.