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The resignation of veteran Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson is an event causing ripples that go way beyond the island where the Scotsman spent his long and illustrious career.

Walk into a bar pretty much anywhere from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, mention Ferguson or his star-studded team of Red Devils, and you can be sure of a lively conversation — and perhaps a heated argument.

Ferguson's name is not always greeted with warmth, especially by supporters of rival English soccer teams whom he so often frustrated in the battle for trophies, of which he won an astounding 38 during his Manchester years.

He was a tough and highly competitive character in a notoriously ruthless business. In the English game, managers and coaches whose teams fail to perform tend to be sacked with unceremonious speed. It is a measure of Ferguson's remarkable success that he held his job for 27 years.

Ferguson's hard-nosed approach was particularly felt by soccer journalists. Those who upset him were banned from his press conferences. For seven years, Ferguson refused to be interviewed by the British Broadcasting Corp. because he was angry about a program it broadcast about him and one of his sons.

He could, at times, be abrasive and also outspoken: He knows how to get under the skin of opposition managers before a big game. He has a long record of lambasting referees for decisions he disliked — apparently undeterred by the resulting fines. In fact, his critics frequently accuse him of striking such fear in the heart of match officials that they become biased in favor of Manchester United players.

He could be a strict disciplinarian with his team and staff. "He was always falling out with people," Michael Crick, author of a book about Ferguson called The Boss, told the BBC. It is said that in Scotland, in the early stages of his managerial career, Ferguson once fined a player merely for having the gall to overtake his car while driving to the ground.

Tributes Flood In

News of Ferguson's decision to leave Manchester United at the end of this season is being greeted with a chorus of tributes from around the world, and a tsunami of statistics about his achievements: two European Champions League crowns, five FA Cups and five League Cups, and more. He leaves on a high — this year, for the 13th time on his watch, Manchester United won the highly prestigious English Premiership title.

In England, Ferguson's departure came as a surprise — and prompted a wave of emotional calls to radio phone-ins from Manchester United fans. But it has been the subject of discussion for years. There is speculation that his health perhaps played a part: He is reportedly due to have a hip operation soon.

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Updated at 9:29 pm ET —- Former South Carolina Republican governor Mark Sanford easily beat Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch to regain the House seat he once held.

For Sanford, the victory in the strongly Republican 1st Congressional District was sure to be widely viewed as a personal redemption. Sanford left the governor's mansion in 2009 after an extramarital affair with an Argentinian woman who is now his fiancee led to the breakup of his marriage.

For his party, Sanford's win was portrayed as a rejection by a solidly Republican district of everything the Democratic Party stands for.

In a statement Chad Connelly, chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, said:

Chad Connelly, Chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, stated in part:

"Tonight, the voters of the First District made it crystal clear that the baggage of Obamacare and Barack Obama's liberal policies are too much, even for a credible Democrat candidate to overcome...

"Voters demonstrated they cannot be bought and that they know Mark Sanford will be another vote for fiscal sanity in Congress. We look forward to Governor Sanford returning to Washington..."

The Senate is considering legislation to prevent a global helium shortage from worsening in October. That's when one huge supply of helium in the U.S. is set to terminate. The House overwhelmingly passed its own bill last month to keep the Federal Helium Program going.

That was a relief to industries that can't get along without helium. The gas is used in MRI machines, semiconductors, aerospace equipment, lasers and of course balloons.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the helium shortage is to talk to people like Stacie Lee Banks, who owns a flower shop in Washington, D.C. She is one of the go-to people in the city for filling large orders of party balloons.

Banks says she started noticing a problem about half a year ago. Her supplier used to send her two tanks of helium every time she was running short. Now he only sends one tank — if that. When she called him recently, he said he was completely out.

In a bind like this, Banks would normally pop over to the CVS pharmacy next door to fill up balloons.

"They're saying we can't use any of their helium anymore either," Banks says. "So it's like, I don't know where we're gonna get helium."

There's a global shortage of refined helium, and it could get worse if the federal government doesn't stay in the business of selling helium.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back to nearly a century ago to World War I. Germany started building huge inflatable aircraft, and to keep up, the U.S. started stockpiling helium. That federal helium reserve is located outside Amarillo, Texas.

Sam Burton of the Bureau of Land Management helps manage the supply. Burton says "he lives and breathes helium." Adding, he's a "total helium geek."

Burton says there are now 10 billion cubic feet of the gas stored in this federal reservoir — enough to fill about 50,000 Goodyear blimps. And it's all kept under a wide open prairie dotted with coyotes and jack rabbits.

"Imagine a layer cake being several thousand feet thick, layers of rock several thousand feet thick, you'd get an idea of how the gas has been stored in one particular layer," Burton explains.

Over the decades, private companies learned how to extract helium too. But they weren't extracting that much of it, partly because the government was selling helium so cheaply.

Then in 1996, Congress decided it was time to get the federal government out of the helium business so it wouldn't compete with private industry. Congress passed a law that would effectively end the helium program this October. The problem is: private companies haven't caught up with demand, and a big hole would be left in the market if Washington suddenly cut off supply as scheduled.

Salo Zelermyer is lobbying to keep the government operating the reserve: "Certainly if you take half the domestic supply and a third of the global supply off the market just like that, you're gonna get a lot volatility in the system. You're going to have a lot of end users that aren't going to be able to meet the needs of both taxpayers and regular folks who go in to get MRIs or go out to buy high-end electronics.

So industries are nervous.

Carolyn Durand of Intel Corporation, which makes semiconductor chips, says they're already learning to limit their use of the gas.

"Where we've been able to replace helium with another inert gas like argon or nitrogen, we have," Durand says. "Where we've been able to conserve, shut off things, instead of keeping continuous flow, we will do that."

If legislation to head off the shortage passes, it would buy private companies time to find reliable domestic sources of helium.