election

Big Republican wins in yesterday's election will not only kill chances that the U.S. Congress will pass a broad climate bill during President Barack Obama's first term, but may also hurt his strategy of winning even scaled-back energy legislation.

Republicans, who had slammed any attempt to put a price on carbon emissions as an "energy tax," won control of the House of Representatives and picked up seats in the Senate.

Despite predictions by U.S. scientists that 2010 could be the warmest year on record, Obama's hopes of signing a bill any time soon … Read more

Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, two ex-Silicon Valley executives who pledged to use their business acumen to fix California's many economic woes, today fell short in their bids to overcome their Democratic rivals.

Despite widespread anti-incumbent sentiment and a California unemployment rate hovering around 12 percent to 13 percent, Whitman and Fiorina failed to overcome their Democratic adversaries: onetime Gov. Jerry Brown, who sought to reclaim his old job, and incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer, who has been in the U.S. Congress for approximately 28 years.

California polls closed at 8 p.m. PT. But it can take a … Read more

Google launches search tools to help Americans vote

Sophos unveils free antivirus software for Mac users

T-Mobile announces a $10 Android phone

Hotmail now works with other e-mail accounts, even Gmail

Google blurs images of homes and faces in Germany on Street View maps

Ubisoft's Michael Jackson Experience game will come with a free sparkly glove if you preorder the Wii version

Martha Stewart launches an iPad app to help you make the best holiday cookies on the block

For a few days this month, with midterm election season heating up, the Internet's army of bored office drones cast aside their usual YouTube fodder of strangely-behaving cats and all things lip-synced and Auto-Tuned. They turned instead to what may or may not have been a completely serious political campaign ad: fresh-faced Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell took to the airwaves, and to the Web, with a spot that began with the proclamation, "I'm not a witch."

There's a backstory, of course. As an evangelical Christian activist appearing on the 1990s talk show "… Read more

Graphics in a political attack ad for California gubernatorial candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman that imitated popular humor blog FailBlog aren't going over too well with Cheezburger Network, the amalgam of blogs that owns FailBlog.

"We are talking to our attorneys on this," Cheezburger Network founder and CEO Ben Huh told CNET via e-mail. "We haven't decided on a course of action, if any. The law is a complex beast."

Huh's comment followed a post he wrote Friday on FailBlog, in which he addressed the fact that a recent video campaign … Read more

You know when something doesn't seem quite right to you? Like hot pants on a bloodhound? Or the chemical makeup of most human beings who live in Marin County, California?

Something didn't seem quite right to me the other day when I watched the campaign ad that purports to tell you why former eBay CEO Meg Whitman will remove some of the tarnish from the Golden State. (You know, the one that forgets to mention she's a Republican.)

It's not that this ad showed Whitman crunking in a nightclub. Or that it showed her showering admiration … Read more

Two days ahead of a new round of planned protests against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Internet access in the nation's capital is largely down, according to Agence France Presse.

Sources close to Iran's technical services say the cut to Tehran's outside access was the result of "a decision by the authorities" and not a technical breakdown, the news agency reports. Telecommunications ministry officials were unavailable for comment.

Protests are scheduled Monday to mark Student Day, the anniversary of the December 6, 1953, killing of three of University of Tehran students by Iranian police. The students … Read more

One of the main themes at TEDGlobal this year was a lively debate between optimistic and pessimistic voices on the social potential (or doom) of the web. This outlook was somewhat more somber than I expected at a TED conference, perhaps – as some attendees suspected – due to the cultural differences between Long Beach and Oxford. There was definitely a palpable sense of enlightened skepticism at the conference, a distinctly European tone that serves as welcome counterweight to the Californian brand of optimism that TED is often associated with (just read this amusingly British commentary in the Times of London).

One … Read more

You can't make this stuff up: Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, set off a political-blog firestorm when he posted to his Twitter account on Wednesday that "Iranian twitter activity (is) similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House."

Presumably he was talking about rallying in the face of adversity. But, um, really? The U.S. congressional elections might be rife with mildly nefarious characters on both sides of the party line, but the current upheaval in Iran deals with a totalitarian regime, media blackouts, and mass … Read more