An accidental drug overdose caused last month’s sudden death of former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith, Florida officials said on Monday. The death of the flamboyant billionaire’s widow at a Florida casino-hotel on February 8 triggered a media frenzy and bitter legal feud over her remains and the custody of her 6-month-old daughter, Dannielynn.
An image of the Liberty Bell, an icon of American freedom and independence, will adorn the United States Postal Service’s new ”forever stamp”. The stamp, which will carry the word ”Forever” instead of a price, will remain valid for sending a letter, no matter how much postal rates go up in the future.
Iran rejected a repeated demand by the United Nations Security Council to suspend uranium enrichment work after the 15-nation body imposed arms and financial sanctions on Tehran. At the same time major powers, who drafted the resolution, immediately offered new talks on Saturday and renewed their offer of an economic and technological incentive package.
The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose new sanctions on Iran for its nuclear ambitions by targeting Tehran’s arms exports, state-owned bank and elite Revolutionary Guards. The new measures are a follow-up to a resolution adopted on December 23 banning trade in sensitive nuclear materials and ballistic missiles.
Senator Barack Obama said on Friday that his campaign had nothing to do with a web ad portraying his chief rival for the Democratic president nomination as an Orwellian figure. Nevertheless, Obama declined to denounce the ad, which depicts Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as Big Brother. He said the ad apparently ”captured the public’s imagination”.
Countering widespread speculation, Harry Potter actress Emma Watson has decided to reprise her role as girl wizard Hermione Granger in the final films of the hit series, Warner Brothers said on Friday. ”I could never let Hermione go — she is my hero!,” Watson said in a statement.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales attended a meeting last November that discussed the imminent enacting of a plan to fire United States federal prosecutors, the Justice Department said in documents released on Friday. The documents showed a much greater involvement for Gonzales than previously acknowledged in the controversial dismissal of eight prosecutors.
Watching users fumble and nearly drop an early version of the FlipStart compact PC practically gave Robin Budd a heart attack. The culprit was the three-key sequence, Control-Alt-Delete, required to log off or reboot a Windows PC. When the shrunken-down laptop goes on sale later this month, early adopters might get a kick out of FlipStart’s solution.
When planes flew into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11 2001, it was the culmination of cunning plans by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Not even Tiger Woods was sure how he would introduce himself on the first tee at Doral Golf Resort, only that the words ”defending champion” would be appropriate in some capacity. But defending champion of what — or where? This is the CA Championship, and it’s a World Golf Championship with a 73-man field.
The international advocacy group Oxfam is taking on United States coffee retailer Starbucks over the chain’s reluctance to grant Ethiopian coffee farmers the right to control their coffee trademarks, something the company has promised to do earlier this year. Oxfam ran an ad in the Seattle Timesrecently urging the corporate icon to give Ethiopian farmers a greater share of the retail value of their coffees.
Luther Ingram, the R&B and soul singer-songwriter best known for his hit If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Want to Be Right) has died. He was 69. Ingram died on March 19 at a Belleville, Illinois, hospital after suffering for years from diabetes, kidney disease and partial blindness, his wife, Jacqui Ingram, said.
John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82. Backus died on March 17 in Ashland, Oregon, according to IBM, where he spent his career.
A wide array of United States broadcasters and online companies on Monday challenged a ruling from a panel of copyright judges that they say could cripple the emerging business of offering music broadcasts over the internet. They are asking the Copyright Royalty Board to reconsider key parts of its March 2 ruling.
Software giant Microsoft on Wednesday launched a string of lawsuits in the United States and Britain against ”cybersquatters” who register internet site names in the hope of a quick buck. The US company said it had filed or amended four civil suits in the US and launched five new cases in Britain.
Russia has told Iran that it will withhold fuel for Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant unless Tehran suspends its uranium enrichment programme as the United Nations Security Council demands, the New York Times reported on Monday.
Sudan’s president on Monday denied his government was involved in widespread human rights abuses in Darfur, where an estimated 200Â 000 people have been killed in what the United States says is the first genocide of this century. Shown a picture of a map depicting burned villages in Sudan’s vast western region during an interview, President Omar al-Bashir called it a ”fabrication”.
South Africa pushed on Monday for a 90-day freeze of Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for a simultaneous suspension of United Nations sanctions that the Security Council is looking to toughen. The 90-day, simultaneous suspension was contained in a series of South African amendments to a draft resolution agreed by six major powers last week.
Sprucing up its famously plain website, Google is offering a new option that plants its internet search box in panoramic settings that change with the time of day and the outside weather. Google’s new package of skins are designed to make the home page feel even more homey, said Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice-president of search products.
Supermodel Naomi Campbell began a week of cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors at the New York City Sanitation Department on Monday as part of a community service order for throwing a cellphone at her maid last year. "She will be sweeping, cleaning, mopping. We have windows that need to be cleaned," said Sanitation Department deputy chief Albert Durrell.
Wallid bin Attash, a captured al-Qaeda operative, has confessed that he was the mastermind of the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, according to a transcript of a military hearing released on Monday. Attash said he bought the explosives and recruited members of the team that rammed an explosives-laden boat into the side of the American destroyer.
President George Bush on Monday warned it was too early for United States troops to "pack up and go home" from Iraq, on the fourth anniversary of a war clouded by pessimism and political angst on the home front.
The United States Supreme Court examines on Monday a case raising questions over free-speech rights in US high schools as it hears arguments over a student’s unfurling of a quirky banner proclaiming ”Bong Hits 4 Jesus”. In 2002, the student, then 18, unveiled the huge banner as the Olympic flame passed in front of a crowd.
Prospective United States voters anxious to know John McCain’s favourite television show or to be friends with Barack Obama now have a chance. The popular social networking site MySpace.com on Sunday launched a section dedicated to the 2008 presidential election.
At just a hair over 43cm tall, the miniature horse is more inclined to walk under fences than jump them — and her owners have sheltered the mare from ever gaining ”circus sideshow” or ”one-trick-pony” status. As the world’s smallest horse, five-year-old Thumbelina, weighing in at 26kg, has a bigger mission.
Lanna Saunders, who followed her father and grandfather into the family craft of acting and was best known for her long-running role on the TV daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives, has died. She was 65. Saunders died on March 10 of complications from multiple sclerosis.
George Bush will be remembered as the worst US President ever, real-estate mogul Donald Trump said on Friday, adding that US Senator Hillary Clinton could be Bush’s White House successor. ”Bush is probably the worst president in the history of the United States,” Trump told CNN.
Forget free toppings. A New York restaurant has started offering a $1 000 (about R7 400) pizza covered with caviar and lobster that the owner says is the most expensive pizza on Earth. The Bellissima Luxury Pizza is piled with lashings of caviar, fresh lobster, wasabi and crème fraiche.
Hundreds of R2-D2s will be popping up on street corners all over the United States in the coming months as part of celebrations to mark the 30th anniversary of <i>Star Wars</i>. About 400 mailboxes across the country will be revamped to make them look like the famous chirruping robot from the science-fiction films.
Climate change is of real concern in all parts of the world, but there is disagreement over whether the problem is urgent enough to require immediate, costly measures or whether more modest efforts will be satisfactory, according to an international poll released on Wednesday.
A man accused of drunken driving and crashing his truck into a lamp post told police a unicorn had been at the wheel when it careered off the road, Los Angeles media reported on Wednesday. Phillip Holliday (42) appeared before a court in the western state of Montana on Tuesday, the <i>Billings Gazette</i> reported.
An independent review of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) operations in Africa says the lender’s work is confused, vague, lacks transparency and suffers from a large gap between rhetoric and practice. "The fund should be clearer and more candid about what it has undertaken to do," says the report.