Global Crossing Limited is a major telecommunications company that provides computer networking services worldwide. It maintains a large backbone and offers transit and peering links, VPN, leased lines, audio and video conferencing, long distance telephone, Managed services, dialup, colocation and VoIP, to customers ranging from individuals to large enterprises and to other carriers. The main emphases are on higher margin layered services like Managed services and VoIP with leased lines. Global Crossing is a tier 1 carrier. The company is legally domiciled in Bermuda for tax purposes, although its administrative headquarters are in New Jersey.

It rode the dot-com boom of the 1990s to incredibly high market values, only to go bankrupt a few years later. Its stock price hit a high of US $64 per share, and would eventually plunge to below $1.

Company chairman Gary Winnick, and former CEOs Leo Hindrey, and Thomas Casey were examples of the excess of that era, each one taking personal fortunes while costing shareholders billions. In addition, Winnick helped Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe turn a $100,000 stock investment into $18,000,000. Winnick later gave a million dollars to President Clinton's presidential library.

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NPR Topics: Politics & Society

Letter About Palin Goes Viral
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:05:00 -0400
This week in Wasilla, Alaska, a woman named Anne Kilkenny sent a letter to some college friends about her former mayor, Sarah Palin. By week's end, the letter was pinging around the country and Kilkenny's phone was ringing off the hook.
Teen Sex, Sex Education And Sarah Palin
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:39:00 -0400
Gov. Sarah Palin has been a strong supporter of programs that advocate abstinence until marriage, and she also opposes explicit sex education. Alaska's law is silent on these issues, however, and it provides no specific funding for sex education in the schools.
Examining Palin's Pentecostal Background
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:14:00 -0400
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has electrified religious conservatives who see her as one of their own. The Republican vice presidential candidate brings evangelical credentials to the ticket and has a Pentecostal background.

The Talk of the Town

Dorothy Wickenden: An old-style, Los Angeles feminist on Obama.
Dorothy Wickenden Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
Rosalind Wyman--seventy-seven years old; doughty feminist; political fund-raiser and philanthropist; hostess to J.F.K., Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, and Hollywood types too numerous to count; youngest elected member of the Los Angeles City Council (at the age of twenty-two); first woman to run a national political . . .
Lauren Collins: The Brooklyn painter Kehinde Wiley.
Lauren Collins Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
The painter Kehinde Wiley first travelled to Nigeria in 1997. He was trying to find his father, whom he had never met, or, more crucially for a portraitist, seen. (His mother didn’t have any photographs.) After several weeks in Lagos, he found his dad, who welcomed him. But--like any . . .
James Surowiecki: What drives market volatility?
James Surowiecki Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
American investors are frazzled. True, oil prices have fallen from their most vertiginous highs, the dollar is a bit stronger, and the stock market has actually risen over the past month. But none of those things have happened in a smooth and steady fashion. The stock market’s “ascent,” in particular . . .

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