Iranian speedboats swarmed three United States navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, radioing a threat to blow them up and prompting a stiff US warning ahead of President George Bush’s trip to the Middle East, Pentagon officials said on Monday.
After Microsoft founder and chairperson Bill Gates gave what he said was his last keynote address to the Consumer Electronics Show late on Sunday night, it’s worth bearing in mind that he has often been dramatically wrong about where he thought technology was heading.
Your cellphone is a potential gold mine for marketers: it can reveal where you are, whom you call and even what music you like. Considering the phone is usually no more than a few metres away, these are powerful clues for figuring out just the right moment to deliver the right coupon for the store just around the corner.
Toshiba said on Sunday its HD DVD high-definition video format is not dead despite being dealt a big setback by Warner’s decision to exclusively back Sony rival Blu-ray technology. Akiyo Ozaka, president of Toshiba America Consumer Products, told a briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that HD DVD "has not lost".
Microsoft chairperson Bill Gates took centre stage at the world’s largest technology show for the last time on Sunday and predicted that his industry was on the cusp of the next "digital decade". Gates said computing will become a pervasive part of everyday life through devices like televisions and cellphones.
The United States Supreme Court will on Monday take up the thorny issue of lethal injections in a bid to determine if this method of executing death-row inmates conforms with the Constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment. The review comes after death-penalty opponents have demonstrated that lethal injection can in fact be painful.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf conceded that a gunman may have shot Benazir Bhutto but said the opposition leader exposed herself to danger and bore responsibility for her death, CBS News said on Saturday. Musharraf was also quoted as telling the CBS 60 Minutes programme that his government did everything it could to provide security for Bhutto.
A lone trader out to win a little fame made the purchase that took oil prices to the historic level of dollars a barrel this week but he lost on the deal, analysts said. The trader has been named by United States and British media as Richard Arens, who runs a one-man oil brokerage, ABS.
A recent report by a Hollywood insider questions the profitability of making movies, writes David Teather.
Oil prices vaulted to a record a barrel on Wednesday as violence in Nigeria, tight energy stockpiles and a weaker dollar triggered a surge of speculative buying, dealers said. Oil’s climb to the psychologically key triple-digit price helped send stocks tumbling on Wall Street and further darkened an already gloomy economic outlook in the United States.
More Americans are googling themselves — and many are checking out their friends, co-workers and romantic interests, too. In a report in December, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said 47% of United States adult internet users had looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine.
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/ 27 December 2007
Despite the last-minute shopping frenzy, holiday retail sales were sluggish as the United States consumer spent less than expected while internet shopping slowed down. Many shoppers waited until the last moment to buy gifts for Christmas, as only 18% of Americans had finished their holiday shopping in mid-December.
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/ 26 December 2007
Online auction giant eBay has launched a microlending website that lets people invest in entrepreneurs in poor communities around the world and get a return on their money. Microplace.com offers investors profits for funding folks trying to build better lives, said founder Tracey Turner.
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/ 26 December 2007
Oscar Peterson’s dazzling keyboard technique, commanding sense of swing and mastery of different piano styles from boogie woogie to bebop could leave even his most accomplished peers awestruck. His death over the weekend brought forth tributes from jazz pianists spanning the generations.
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/ 26 December 2007
Online social-networking websites saw their ranks swell and values soar in 2007 as everyone from moody teenagers and mellow music lovers to mate-seeking seniors joined online communities. Seven out of the 10 hottest topics that triggered Google internet queries during the year involved social networking.
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/ 26 December 2007
A tiger that mauled a zookeeper last year escaped from its pen at the San Francisco Zoo on Tuesday, killing one man and injuring two others before police shot it dead, authorities said. The three men were in their 20s; they were together and were not zoo employees, a San Francisco police spokesperson said.
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/ 26 December 2007
It was the kind of breakthrough scientists had dreamed of for decades and its promise to help cure disease appears to be fast on the way to being realised. Researchers in November announced they were able to turn the clock back on skin cells and transform them into stem cells, the mutable building blocks of organs and tissues.
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/ 26 December 2007
Helping illegal immigrants has become an unpopular business in the United States. Republican and Democratic presidential candidates alike have backed down from any previous support for illegal immigrants, and ordinary Americans are treading just as carefully in the face of a growing backlash against the 12-million people here illegally.
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/ 25 December 2007
He doesn’t speak Spanish and has no idea what America should do about illegal immigration, but Reverend Larry Kreps knows he’s now on a list somewhere of people willing to help illegal immigrants in a time of crisis. Months ago, a member of Kreps’ suburban Ohio congregation was looking for a place where local Hispanics could meet.
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/ 24 December 2007
A heavy snowstorm pelted the American Midwest, causing deadly road accidents and power failures and grounding flights for Christmas holiday travellers, United States media reported on Monday. The storm left at least 11 dead in car crashes across the central US over the weekend, local papers said.
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/ 23 December 2007
Ledgers gathered in the Balco steroid investigation outline the detailed doping programme of disgraced sprinter Marion Jones, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Saturday. The newspaper cited court documents filed by prosecutors in New York in support of their case against Jones, who has pleaded guilty to lying to investigators.
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/ 22 December 2007
A dilemma confronts many Democratic activists in the United States. They respect Hillary Clinton’s intellect. They admire her performance in the debates. But it is difficult for them to commit to a candidate who not only voted in favour of the war on Iraq in 2002, but has refused to express contrition, or any deep emotion, about that choice.
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/ 22 December 2007
The Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to extend the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for a year and demanded that all militias and armed groups in the volatile east lay down their weapons and start disarming. The council asked the UN force ”to attach the highest priority to addressing the crisis”.
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/ 22 December 2007
The Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to wrap up the United Nations peacebuilding mission in Sierra Leone in September next year, praising this year’s peaceful and democratic elections in the West African nation and efforts to professionalise its armed forces.
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/ 21 December 2007
Protesters, unfazed by violent clashes with police hours earlier, on Friday vowed to continue their battle against a plan to demolish 218 public housing buildings in New Orleans, a bid that has further highlighted the growing tensions in a city struggling to recover two years after Hurricane Katrina.
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/ 21 December 2007
With the first showdown only days away, United States presidential hopefuls will take a break for Christmas and let their television ads propagate some holiday cheer, but not exempt of political undertones. As expected, it looks like all the candidates have cleared their agendas of rallies and meetings at least on December 25, though the first contest, the Iowa caucuses, is held only nine days later.
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/ 20 December 2007
Aid groups urged the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday to set a 30-day deadline for Sudan to stop obstructing the planned January 1 deployment of UN-African Union peacekeepers to Darfur or face sanctions. ”The new hybrid peacekeeping force for Darfur is being set up to fail,” said a statement.
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/ 20 December 2007
Christmas is going to the dogs — and cats — in the United States, where many of the 71,1-million US households that have a furry family member include them in their holiday celebrations. That doesn’t just mean buying them a present, but includes throwing a party for them, having them photographed with Santa, or giving them a spa treatment.
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/ 19 December 2007
After 45 years, 21 films and countless vodka martinis, Hollywood’s longest-running action hero — James Bond — is in rude health, according to the actor who knows 007 best: Roger Moore. Afficionados might argue that nobody did it better than Sean Connery; but where history is concerned, nobody did it more often than Moore.
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/ 19 December 2007
Time magazine named Russian President Vladimir Putin its person of the year for 2007 on Wednesday, saying he had returned his country from chaos to ”the table of world power” though at a cost to democratic principles. ”He’s not a good guy, but he’s done extraordinary things,” said Time managing editor Richard Stengel.
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/ 19 December 2007
Monkeys performed about as well as college students at mental addition, United States researchers said on Monday in a finding that suggests non-verbal maths skills are not unique to humans. The research follows the finding by Japanese researchers that young chimpanzees performed better than human adults at a memory game.
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/ 19 December 2007
The United Nations General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution on Tuesday calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, overcoming protests from a bloc of states that said it undermined their sovereignty. The resolution, which calls for ”a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty,” was passed by a 104 to 54 vote, with 29 abstentions.