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/ 22 December 2005
Boeing says it plans to deliver 112 of its new 787 airplanes in 2008 and 2009, and is still on track to get the plane into service in the early summer of 2008. Still, the company could soon reach a point where it is unable to provide potential customers with airplanes as quickly as they might want them.
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/ 22 December 2005
United States President George Bush was forced late on Wednesday to settle for a face-saving compromise on a key counterterrorism law that fell far short of his goal to see it expended indefinitely. Republican and Democratic senators agreed to extend the main provisions of the USA Patriot Act for only six months.
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/ 21 December 2005
New Yorkers faced another bone-chilling commute on Wednesday without their cherished subways and buses as a transit strike entered its second day, leaving both patience and shoe leather wearing thin. With talks still stalled, a judge imposed a huge fine on Tuesday against the Transport Workers’ Union.
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/ 21 December 2005
America Online (AOL) has sealed a late deal with Google to deepen their relationship, while leaving Microsoft as the spurned suitor. The software titan’s failure to woo AOL away from Google in favour of its own search technology highlights the uphill battle Microsoft faces in the lucrative business of selling online ads.
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/ 20 December 2005
Character actress Mary Jackson, best known as Miss Emily Baldwin on the iconic 1970s television series The Waltons, has died. She was 95. On The Waltons, which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1981, Jackson played one of two sisters who made bootleg whiskey they referred to as ”the recipe”.
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/ 20 December 2005
T Edward Hambleton, a founder of off-Broadway’s influential Phoenix Theatre, has died at age 94. Hambleton died on Saturday at the Greater Baltimore medical centre of complications from an esophageal tumour, his son-in-law, Ken Buhler, said on Monday.
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/ 20 December 2005
John Spencer, who plays vice-presidential candidate Leo McGarry on NBC television’s <i>The West Wing</i>, died of a heart attack on Friday, his publicist said. Spencer’s work on the show earned him an Emmy Award for supporting actor in a drama series in 2002, as well as a Golden Globe nomination.
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/ 20 December 2005
New York on Tuesday was facing a busy pre-Christmas shopping day with no subway or bus services after transit workers voted to go on strike, an action mayor Michael Bloomberg called ”illegal and morally reprehensible”. More than seven million residents of this sprawling city will have to find alternate means of transportation.
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/ 20 December 2005
United States auto makers are hoping to reverse their sliding market share in 2006 with impressive new vehicles and sweeping restructuring plans. But their efforts could be undermined by a host of uncertainties, from the ongoing bankruptcy of auto supplier Delphi to gas prices and fidgety consumers.
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/ 19 December 2005
As United States President George Bush appealed on Sunday for patience with his Iraq policies, analysts agreed the coming months were crucial to his hopes of getting out of an increasingly unpopular war. In a prime-time television speech, Bush went to extraordinary lengths to win backing for his efforts to quell an insurgency still raging 33 months after the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
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/ 17 December 2005
A Southwest Airlines jet was evacuated at an airport in the Los Angeles region on Friday after a passenger was reportedly heard to say the word ”bomb”, prompting a security alert, authorities said. The Southwest flight had been taxiing to takeoff at Bob Hope airport in Burbank, California when the evacuation was ordered, said an airport spokesperson.
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/ 17 December 2005
Congolese must cast ballots if the Democratic Republic of Congo is to put years of violence behind it, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said through a spokesperson on Friday. ”For the democratic process to succeed, it is essential that the Congolese people play their full part,” Annan’s spokesperson said.
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/ 14 December 2005
New Yorkers Joel Krupnik and Mildred Castellanos have been drawing stares this Christmas by decking the front of their Manhattan mansion not with holly and lights but with a knife-wielding, 1,5m-tall St Nick and a tree full of decapitated Barbie dolls.
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/ 14 December 2005
Steven Wooke takes a swig from a bottle of Heineken as his left hand rests on a small table, his fingers spread out like a fan of playing cards. He’s getting a manicure — or hand detailing, as the salon calls it — and it’s a form of pampering the 24-year-old information technology manager has learned to enjoy.
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/ 13 December 2005
For those too young to have lived through them, it can feel like the Depression and World War II happened in black and white. So, the brilliance in a trove of rarely seen colour photographs of the era is startling: a female railroad worker sports a red kerchief and matching nail polish; factory rows of B-25 bombers sprout like yellow corn.
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/ 13 December 2005
High-flying internet company Google and 11 other companies were added on Monday to the Nasdaq 100, the Nasdaq Stock Market’s index of the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the market. The Nasdaq 100 is a widely used benchmark for a variety of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
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/ 13 December 2005
With hat in hand on the eve of his departure, a German prosecutor on Monday delivered more evidence of Syria’s role in slaying a Lebanese political figure and charged that some documentation had been burned and destroyed in Syria. Detlev Mehlis charges that Syria still has not cooperated fully with the United Nations investigation.
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/ 12 December 2005
DreamWorks SKG, the studio co-owned by director-producer Steven Spielberg, will be bought by Paramount Pictures, in a deal announced on Sunday in Hollywood. The deal represents a failure by the studio’s founders to build a firm successfully integrated across the spectrum of popular arts and culture.
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/ 11 December 2005
Eugene McCarthy, a former United States senator and an indomitable anti-war activist whose firm stance against the Vietnam War forced a re-evaluation of the US role in the conflict, has died at the age of 89, Democratic Party officials said. McCarthy passed away in his sleep at his retirement home in the US capital early on Saturday.
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/ 11 December 2005
Groundbreaking African-American comedian Richard Pryor died of a heart attack early Saturday at the age of 65, his wife said. The pioneering stand-up comic and actor who broke barriers with his unflinching racial satire had been in declining health for years after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986.
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/ 11 December 2005
Groundbreaking African-American comedian Richard Pryor died of a heart attack early Saturday at the age of 65, his wife said. The pioneering stand-up comic and actor who broke barriers with his unflinching racial satire had been in declining health for years after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986.
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/ 10 December 2005
Investigators studied the crash scene on Friday after a passenger jet trying to land amid heavy snow plowed off a Midway International airport runway and into a Chicago street, killing a six-year-old boy in a car. Ten other people, most of them on the ground, were injured in the Thursday-evening accident.
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/ 8 December 2005
In a rare concession to critics of the Iraq war, United States President George Bush agreed on Wednesday that ”mistakes have been made” but said US-led reconstruction and security efforts were making solid progress. ”Reconstruction has not always gone as well as we had hoped, primarily because of the security challenges on the ground,” he said.
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/ 8 December 2005
Substantial progress has been achieved in providing microcredit to the world’s poorest families, those earning less than a dollar a day, according to a report released on Wednesday. The Microcredit Summit Campaign said more than 92-million of these families received loans in 2004, nearly a seven-fold hike from the 13,5-million loan recipients in 1997.
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/ 8 December 2005
Scalding chickens alive is the wrong way to prepare meat for a McNugget, animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said on Wednesday. Peta and socially responsible investment firm Trillium Asset Management issued a shareholder’s resolution calling on the fast food giant McDonald’s to require its suppliers to switch to a humane system of slaughtering chickens.
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/ 8 December 2005
They are the addicts who slake their craving in public, snatch a fix in boring business meetings, on the subway, or even risk a hit during rows with their spouses. But Americans hooked on the BlackBerry hand-held computer, dubbed by wags as the ”CrackBerry” for the hold it has on users, may soon be tasting cold turkey, if a patent dispute forces its maker to turn off the service.
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/ 7 December 2005
Hamlet’s father runs a club — not a kingdom — and the ”sweet prince” drunkenly raps a version of his famous ”To be or not to be” soliloquy in a modern take on one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays by a group of teenagers. Brainstorming ideas for a project promoting non-violence, Chicago students chose a work in which almost all the main characters are dead by the time the curtain falls.
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/ 7 December 2005
The number of Hollywood films showing on-screen smoking is back up to the levels of the 1950s, with nearly 80% of films rated for young audiences including scenes in which characters light up. Why nearly half of all teenage smokers in the United States try cigarettes can be linked to on-screen smoking, leading researchers to call for an adult rating for all films that depict tobacco use.
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/ 7 December 2005
Ford Motor Company came under fire this week after it was reported to have pulled ads from gay publications in a "secret deal" with a conservative Christian group. The automaker denied that any deal had been made and insisted that the decision to cease advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover brands in gay publications was part of a broad restructuring of the advertising budgets.
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/ 6 December 2005
The Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg has broken his silence over his controversial new film about Israel’s response to the massacre of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and at the same time revealed a personal project to promote understanding between Israeli and Palestinian children.
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/ 6 December 2005
China is challenging United States interests and values in Africa, shielding ”rogue states,” harming the environment and thwarting anti-corruption drives, according to a new independent survey of US policy on the continent. Beijing and the United States are on opposite sides in a new struggle for influence and resources in the new ”playing field” of Africa, said the survey.
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/ 6 December 2005
Nearly two years after Nasa’s twin rovers parachuted to Mars, a Jekyll-and-Hyde picture is emerging about the planet’s past and whether it could have supported life. Both Spirit and Opportunity uncovered geologic evidence of a wet past, a sign that ancient Mars may have been hospitable to life.