No image available
/ 25 November 2006
Federal regulators in the United States have pressed Ford for information about its business in Syria and Sudan, which are under economic sanctions or other controls for being state sponsors of terrorism. Ford said its operations in those countries are legal and not material to investors.
No image available
/ 23 November 2006
Information technology giant IBM on Wednesday said it agreed to pay -million to settle a class action lawsuit concerning overtime pay. International Business Machines said that litigation ”would have been lengthy, burdensome and expensive, and IBM chose to resolve it.”
No image available
/ 23 November 2006
The battle of the bulge has become a new rallying cry for several United States politicians who have made their personal fight against obesity central to their politics. At a time of no-holds-barred negative campaigning, analysts said the public often is looking for a positive, feel-good political message.
No image available
/ 23 November 2006
A Russian cosmonaut-turned-golfer took his game out of this world on Wednesday, knocking a ball from the International Space Station in a publicity stunt for a Canadian golf club manufacturer. Aired live on Nasa television, Mikhail Tyurin whacked the ball during a space walk outside the station after struggling to get into position with the help of a United States astronaut.
No image available
/ 22 November 2006
The long-rumoured arrival of a hybrid cellphone and iPod music player from Apple has morphed from a question of ”if” to ”when” among fans and analysts. Since the introduction of the iPod five years ago, the company has sold more than 67-million of the devices and more than 1,5-billion songs from its iTunes online music store.
No image available
/ 21 November 2006
Robert Altman, the caustic and irreverent satirist behind M*A*S*H, Nashville and The Player, who made a career out of bucking Hollywood management and story conventions, died at a Los Angeles hospital, his Sandcastle 5 production company said on Tuesday. He was 81.
No image available
/ 21 November 2006
Almost two-thirds of South African black women entrepreneurs — more than one million business owners overall — have no access to credit or loans and represent a lucrative new market, a World Bank study found on Tuesday. About 38% of black South African women are formally banked compared with 44% of black men.
No image available
/ 21 November 2006
Scientists have found a way to use the cotton plant, long a source of fibre for clothing but inedible by humans, to feed potentially half a billion people a year. Plant biotechnologist Keerti Rathore and colleagues reported on Monday they have genetically altered the plant to reduce the levels of the toxic chemical gossypol.
No image available
/ 20 November 2006
Ruth Brown’s recordings of Teardrops in My Eyes and (Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean dominated the R&B charts in the 1950s and earned her the nickname ”Miss Rhythm”. But her other nickname might as well be ”Miss Survivor” for persevering through the highs and lows of a career spanning six decades.
No image available
/ 20 November 2006
Twenty years after Mike Tyson battered Trevor Berbick to become the youngest heavyweight world champion in history, the ”Baddest Man on the Planet” is aging as badly as any boxing cautionary tale. Tyson was 20 years old on November 22 1986 when he pummelled Berbick into submission in two rounds, seizing the World Boxing Council crown.
No image available
/ 18 November 2006
The United States federal government gave the beauty industry a long-sought push-up late on Friday as it lifted a 14-year-old ban on women’s silicone breast implants. In an official announcement, the Food and Drug Administration said it had granted permission to two California companies to resume marketing their silicone-gel breast implants to women aged 22 and older.
No image available
/ 18 November 2006
Tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams reneged on a deal to play in a 2001 ”Battle of the Sexes” match, costing the promoters millions of dollars, an attorney claimed on Friday during opening statements in a breach-of-contract lawsuit against the sisters and their father.
No image available
/ 18 November 2006
A shooting. A stabbing. A beating. A hold-up. Friday’s release of the new PlayStation 3 gaming console led to several violent incidents across the United States. In Connecticut, two armed men tried to rob a line of people waiting to buy the console early on Friday and shot one who refused to give up the money, authorities said.
No image available
/ 17 November 2006
Top United States officials on Friday mourned the death of Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, whose ideas helped power a conservative policy revolution in the 1980s. Friedman died of heart failure on Thursday at the age of 94 in San Francisco, California, near Stanford University where he taught most recently, friends and associates said.
No image available
/ 16 November 2006
"Jagshemash!!!" Kazakhstan is belatedly turning the joke on Borat, using the blundering fictional reporter as an unlikely prop to "make benefit" its tourism industry. Embracing the maxim "if you can’t beat them, join them", a Kazakhstan-based tour company has pounced on Borat’s conquest of Hollywood to lure Americans keen to find out what the country is really like.
No image available
/ 14 November 2006
Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican who guided his city through the chaos of the September 11 attacks, has taken a key step towards a possible 2008 United States presidential run. Giuliani has filed papers in New York state to set up a committee to explore a possible candidacy, although an aide said Monday he has not made up his mind.
No image available
/ 14 November 2006
Antibodies that are active against HIV proteins may provide a successful strategy against infection, investigators report. In test tube experiments, an antibody that attacks the outer HIV envelope glycoprotein 41, which was labeled with a radioactive isotope so its movement could be detected, killed white blood cells infected with HIV.
No image available
/ 14 November 2006
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan intends to propose a ”hybrid” African Union-UN force for Darfur in talks with Sudanese officials and has invited major powers to take part. Sudan has been adamantly opposed to a UN force so the UN is considering alternatives to get a larger and better-funded peacekeeping operation acceptable to Khartoum.
No image available
/ 13 November 2006
While teaching American humour to a gregarious and absurdly out-of-touch foreign journalist, Pat Haggerty realised something was off — who was this guy? Haggerty, a public-speaking coach from Washington, DC, is one of the unwitting co-stars of the surprise hit movie Borat.
No image available
/ 13 November 2006
The crowd roared as blue lights flickered, and images of skulls and three-eyed creatures were superimposed behind the Swedish electronica music duo The Knife.
The enigmatic brother-and-sister band wooed a packed audience at New York’s Webster Hall with their angular, often foreboding sound and graphics projected on a translucent screen that covered the stage.
No image available
/ 13 November 2006
First there was On Bullshit, a slim philosophical treatise whose phenomenal success took the publishing industry by surprise. And now there is On Truth, a sequel to On Bullshit that its author, Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, says is meant to plug an analytical gap in his first book.
No image available
/ 13 November 2006
The real champion? Not yet. But close. Wladimir Klitschko’s seventh-round knockout of Calvin Brock on Saturday made for an impressive first defence of the IBF title he took from Chris Byrd in April. Now Klitschko has his sights on the other three heavyweight champions: Shannon Briggs, Nicolay Valuev and Oleg Maskaev.
No image available
/ 10 November 2006
Veteran CBS newsman Ed Bradley, a pioneering black American journalist who won acclaim as a Vietnam War correspondent and later as a reporter for ”60 Minutes,” died on Thursday of complications from leukemia. He was 65. Bradley, whose illness was not widely known, had just begun his 26th year as one of the team of reporters featured on the landmark CBS News magazine show.
No image available
/ 10 November 2006
Democrats completed their sweep to power in the United States Congress on Thursday, winning the last Senate seat and moving quickly from bitter campaign rhetoric to pledges to try to find common ground with President George Bush. Faced with a new political landscape, Bush signalled a more conciliatory approach on Iraq.
No image available
/ 10 November 2006
Ur dumped, Kevin Federline — and you are now part of a growing club of spurned lovers who have been ditched by SMS. A video of Britney Spears’ soon-to-be ex-husband apparently getting a SMS informing him that the pop princess had filed for divorce became the most viewed item on YouTube on Thursday, with more than one million hits.
No image available
/ 10 November 2006
A small but increasingly vocal group of United States parents and educators is pushing for homework to be abolished for younger children on grounds that it serves no purpose. According to two new books on the subject, American children are being robbed of time to enjoy hobbies, sports and even family time because of too much homework.
No image available
/ 9 November 2006
Microsoft’s Windows Vista, the software giant’s first major upgrade of its operating system in five years, is complete and will be available to retail customers on January 30, a senior executive said on Wednesday. In the first year of release, Vista will be installed on more than 100-million computers worldwide, according to research firm IDC.
No image available
/ 9 November 2006
Hamstrung by the collapse of his Republican majority in Congress, President George Bush faced the humbling task on Thursday of reaching across party lines to Democrats swept to power by voter anger over his Iraq policy. Bush’s fence-mending with Democratic leaders follow word that they have won enough seats to take control of the United States Senate.
No image available
/ 8 November 2006
United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned on Wednesday, paying the price for the Democrat surge to power in Congress driven by a wave of public anger over the Iraq war. President George Bush announced the veteran power broker’s departure, sending shockwaves though Washington.
No image available
/ 8 November 2006
A Democratic takeover of the United States Senate rested on Wednesday on a few thousand votes as two races were too close to call and risked throwing an American election once again into extra time. Senate races in Montana and Virginia were agonisingly tight but appeared to be trending towards the Democrats.
No image available
/ 8 November 2006
Nancy Pelosi, a hate figure for the Republican right, is poised to become the first woman speaker in United States Congressional history after the Democrats election triumph. The pro-abortion, anti-war Pelosi’s elevation to the number three position in the US Constitution is all but certain after the Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1994.
No image available
/ 7 November 2006
Democrats hoped to sweep Republicans out of power in the United States Congress on Tuesday after a bruising campaign dominated by discontent with the Iraq war and doubts about President George Bush’s leadership. Democrats are on course to recapture control of the US House of Representatives for the first time since 1994, polls showed.