Talks between the Boston Globe and its unions to prevent the newspaper from shutting stopped early on Monday morning after a midnight deadline.

The discovery was announced two years ago amid fanfare and to the astonishment of the art world: a dusty batch of 32 previously unknown Jackson Pollocks had been found in a Long Island storage locker dating from the important period of his early drip paintings, 1946 to 1949.

It was supposed to be a geek palace for some of the brightest people on the planet. Dissonant angles, sloping floors, an exterior that suggested some sort of implosion -- these were just the sort of challenges that inspire the great brains sheltered therein.

Alice Ghostley, the Tony Award-winning actress best known on television for playing Esmeralda on Bewitched and Bernice on Designing Women, has died. She was 81. Ghostley died on September 21 at her home in Studio City after a long battle with colon cancer and a series of strokes.

General David Petraeus, the commander of United States forces in Iraq, admitted on Friday that sending 30 000 more troops into the war zone in January had failed to yield the desired results. "It has not worked out as we had hoped," the general said.