No image available
/ 20 February 2007
"Patch Tuesday", when Microsoft releases repairs for problems in its software, came and went last week with six critical fixes — including the first one that touches Vista, the new operating system billed as the most secure Windows version yet. This isn’t to say that Vista had previously appeared clean.
No image available
/ 1 February 2007
An advertising campaign for a late-night animated series went seriously wrong on Wednesday when police in Boston mistook the ads for explosive devices and shut down half the city. The discovery of five suspect devices sent authorities into a tailspin, closing off major roads, suspending rail services and river transport and causing major disruption in the city as police investigated.
No image available
/ 1 February 2007
A television network’s marketing campaign went badly awry on Wednesday, causing a day-long security scare in Boston. Apologising for Boston’s biggest security alert since the September 11 attacks, Turner Broadcasting said it had placed electronic devices to promote an animated cartoon.
No image available
/ 31 January 2007
A Harvard study has raised new doubts over the authenticity of three paintings previously thought to be works by abstract artist Jackson Pollock, weighing into a simmering controversy in the art world. The report by the Harvard University Art Museums suggested the three paintings may have employed paints not available until after the painter’s death.
No image available
/ 25 January 2007
Microsoft landed in the Wikipedia doghouse on Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced web encyclopedia site. "We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said.
No image available
/ 18 January 2007
The amount of nicotine that smokers typically inhale per cigarette rose by 11% from 1998 to 2005, perpetuating a ”tobacco pandemic” that makes it harder for smokers to quit, a Harvard study said on Thursday. To boost amounts of nicotine inhaled by smokers, cigarette makers intensified the concentration of nicotine in their tobacco and modified cigarette designs.
No image available
/ 1 November 2006
A Maine attorney who released information in 2000 about President George Bush’s drunken driving conviction was arrested on Tuesday after he dressed up as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and waved a fake gun at traffic. Police in South Portland, Maine, arrested Thomas Connolly (49) of Scarborough, Maine, and charged him with criminal threatening.
No image available
/ 23 October 2006
IBM filed two lawsuits against Amazon.com on Monday, claiming key aspects of the internet retailer’s websites violate patents held by Big Blue. Amazon is accused of infringing on five IBM patents, including technologies that govern how the site handles customer recommendations, advertising and data storage.
No image available
/ 17 October 2006
Former United States Republican Gerry Studds, the first openly gay person elected to Congress, died early on October 14 at the Boston Medical Centre, several days after he collapsed while walking his dog, his husband said. Studds fell unconscious on October 3 because of what doctors later determined was a blood clot in his lung, Dean Hara said.
Even the most efficient student would have agonised over the assignment — a 30-page term paper on the social value of literary criticism. But Richard finished it in one evening, cutting and pasting paragraphs off the internet for an online company that sells papers to desperate United States college students.
A Washington-bound United Airlines flight from London made an emergency landing in Boston on Wednesday after a confrontation with a woman suffering from claustrophobia, but there was no apparent terrorist threat, police and security officials said.
Oscar-winning American actress Maureen Stapleton, who traded early success in the theatre into a highly successful film career in movies such as Reds and Cocoon, has died. She was 80. Born to an Irish Catholic family, Stapleton began acting in theatre after finishing high school.
First came the cracking noise, then a bit of dust from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Paul Cunha’s ”magnificent morning” on Africa’s highest peak was over. ”We started hearing some yelling,” he recalled. ”You could see some rocks starting to fall,” the 45-year-old said on Sunday from his bed at Massachusetts General Hospital. ”People were yelling ‘rock, run, watch out!”’
No image available
/ 18 September 2005
Stanley Burnshaw, a publisher and literary critic who edited the works of his friend Robert Frost, died on Friday on Martha’s Vineyard in the United States. He was 99. Burnshaw, whose literary career spanned more than seven decades, also won critical acclaim for his own poems and books.
With a combined age of 245 and multimillion-pound fortunes to match, the Rolling Stones could be forgiven for quietly hanging up their guitars. But instead the original bad boys of rock’n’roll kicked off their latest world tour in front of a sell-out crowd at Boston’s Fenway Park on Sunday with a concert so loud it had policemen patrolling outside with sound meters.
He has been ”spotted” all over the United States, in Canada, Europe, Mexico and Brazil, Paraguay, and most recently, in two coastal resort towns in Uruguay. Despite unconfirmed sightings in about 30 countries and on every continent but Antarctica, notorious Boston gangster James ”Whitey” Bulger remains elusive after more than a decade on the run.
A man was sentenced on Thursday to more than seven years in prison for sexually assaulting a woman sleeping next to him on an airline flight. Deepak Jahagirdar (55) a former health care executive from Scottsdale, Arizona, was convicted in April of sexually abusing and having abusive sexual contact with the woman, then 22.
Visa USA and American Express are cutting ties with the payment-processing company that left 40-million credit and debit card accounts vulnerable to hackers in one of the biggest breaches of consumer data security. CardSystems Solutions ”has not corrected, and cannot at this point correct, the failure to provide proper data security for Visa accounts,” said Rosetta Jones, a vice president at Foster City, California-based Visa.
Like millions of Harry Potter fans, Katherine Moss can’t wait to get her fingers on a copy of the sixth entry in JK Rowling’s best-selling series. And for once, the 16-year-old blind student won’t have to wait weeks longer than her sighted friends to dive into Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
A Maine man arrested when police showed up to break up a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house has filed a lawsuit, arguing he has a constitutional right to get drunk on private property as long as he doesn’t cause a public disturbance. Eric Laverriere was locked in a cell for nine hours until the effects of the alcohol wore off.
During her first five years in the navy, Jen Kopfstein avoided conversations about her personal life, taking the military’s ”don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays seriously. ”I felt like I was being forced to lie and having to be dishonest,” Kopfstein said. ”I could never share anything about my family or my home life or even say what I did on the weekend. It is hurtful to do that.”
Tobacco companies did elaborate research on women to figure out how to hook them on smoking — even toying with the idea of chocolate-flavoured cigarettes that would curb appetite, according to a new analysis. Carrie Carpenter, the study’s lead author, said the companies’ research went far beyond a marketing or advertising campaign.
Attention, time travellers: Amal Dorai hopes you enjoyed the party he’s throwing this weekend. Dorai, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is hosting a time-traveller convention on campus this Saturday. Make plans now, because it’s the last such party. "You only need one," he said.
No image available
/ 3 November 2004
![]()
Defeated Democrat John Kerry on Wednesday said the United States must heal dangerous divisions cleaving society, after admitting defeat in the US election to President George Bush. Kerry said he and Bush had spoken about the need to unite the country when he called to congratulate the president on winning a second term in office.
No image available
/ 11 October 2004
If you’re interested in who’s going to be the next United States president then forget the precedents. If history is anything to go by, both John Kerry and George W Bush will win. No candidate who lost the popular vote but won the presidency has ever been re-elected. But then no president has failed to be re-elected during a major war. If Americans choose Bush, it will be from fear, a lack of choice — and a preference for power over safety.
Massachusetts consumers could receive as much as -million worth of computer products, while North Dakota consumers could get as much as -million in separate, proposed settlements of class-action lawsuits accusing Microsoft of violating each state’s antitrust laws.
Three of the four Massachusetts communities that married same-sex couples from outside the state have stopped issuing licenses to non-residents after receiving a warning from the state attorney general, who cited a 1913 law that bars them from marrying gay couples from other states.
For years, futurists have dreamed of machines that can read minds, then act on instructions as they are thought. Now, human trials are set to begin on a brain-computer interface involving implants. Cyberkinetics of Foxboro, Massachusetts, has received approval to begin a clinical trial in which four-square-millimetre chips will be placed beneath the skulls of paralysed patients.
Show us the profits, the skeptics shout. Nanotechnology will amount to nanoprofits, they worry as they tick off a list of technologies from artificial intelligence to virtual reality that looked cool in the lab but have foundered commercially.
No image available
/ 28 November 2003
Conservative blacks in the United States are objecting to recent comparisons between gay marriages and the 1960s civil rights movement, which fought segregation against blacks, arguing that sexual orientation is a choice. A Massachusetts court ruled last week that gay couples have the right to marry in that state.
Being thrown from a container ship, drifting for more than a decade, bobbing through three oceans — it’s enough to turn a rubber duckie white.
No image available
/ 31 January 2003
A US judge sentenced Briton Richard Reid — a self-proclaimed disciple of Osama bin Laden — to life imprisonment on Thursday for trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight with explosives hidden in his shoe.