by Claudine Zap A few weeks ago, most people would have been hard-pressed to name the governor of South Carolina, much less his Argentinean girlfriend. But Mark Sanford , who found himself in the unwanted glare of the media spotlight after sneaking away to a love tryst with his mistress in South America, adds his name to the growing list of Republicans and Democrats whose careers have stalled out over a sex scandal.

Chris Crum at WebProNews.com has pieced together some very interesting pieces of information regarding Facebook, a former Googler and a new payment system. Facebook in May announced that it was testing a new payments system that would deal in real money, rather than virtual currencies that it had been using for any number of applications. This might work fine for Mafia Wars and other light games that Facebook has increasingly added, but if you were to want to move into, say,

If you want to convince someone to share her Social Security number, mother's maiden name, and a credit card number, will these smiley and frowny faces do the trick? Experian, a reputable credit scoring service, apparently thinks so. Experian's ConsumerInfo.com ad, as seen on AOL.com, before activating animation: Experian's ConsumerInfo.

You may remember the inaugural edition of Adopt a Feature , for which you made videos about AudioSwap , Country Pulldown , Insight , Playlists , Quick Capture , and Subscriptions . These videos generated 818,698 views (they're all collected here ) and a bunch of them even got featured on our homepage. At the end of the two month run, thecomputernerd01 was crowned the Adopt a Feature king,

If you dont spend all day staring at airfares and hotel rates, you might not know how much they fluctuate. The same trip can vary by hundreds of dollars from day to day. That can make it hard to know whether youre getting a good deal or not. Luckily, youve got Bing Travel s deal-finding tools to help you out. We can help you find great deals on airfare and tell you whens the right time to buy. We can help you find great deals on hotels and figure out which hotel to book.

Hi all, After much anticipation, we are finally releasing several major updates to our dupe detection technology and content submission process that should go a long way in eliminating duplicate submissions. To better understand the nature of the problem, we analyzed the types of duplicate stories being submitted. Most common are the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs.

Mercedes is set to launch its oversized Online Publisher Association standard ads on NYTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com tomorrow. E-Class ads will run on the New York Times and Washington Post homepages for one day only. And, in addition to those placements, the OPA units will be seen September 15 on Reuters.com and September 22 on WSJ.com. The OPA announced today that Brands from Frito-Lay to Mercedes-Benz will use the organization's new ad formats,

by Vera H-C Chan As if to make up for the relative quiet of May, June brought news of transportation mayhem, historical revolutions, political scandals, and celebrity passings. Below, the stories that reverberated on Yahoo! Search and beyond. In Memoriam The word icon was invoked repeatedly with shocking deaths, sad passings, and unexpected departures. In the TV arena, David Carradine's apparently accidental hanging exposed a startling private life,

We've been tracking the affiliate tax debacle involving Amazon and the state of North Carolina . Now, affiliates in more states are being affected. Associates in Rhode Island and Hawaii are receiving emails notifying them of the cancellation of their affiliate accounts. Rhode Island passed a bill making affiliates consist of a physical location for web retailers, which forces them to pay sales tax in the state. Hawaii is considering a similar bill. Blue Nile,

by Claudine Zap Our top picks from the day's hottest searches. Ana Ortiz (Searches increased by 22,004%). The "Ugly Betty" actress who plays older sister Hilda can now add "mom" to her resume: She and husband Noah Lebenzon welcomed a baby girl . Peanut butter (+886%). Meet the newest health food: The sticky stuff may hold off heart disease . Bernard Madoff (+2,366%). Now that the scam artist is behind bars, the hunt for all that missing money begins .