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/ 25 October 2005
A quiet revolution is transforming life on the internet: new, agile software now lets people quickly check flight options, see stock prices fluctuate and better manage their online photos and e-mail. Such tools make computing less of a chore because they sit on distant web servers and run over standard browsers.
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/ 25 October 2005
A quiet revolution is transforming life on the internet: new, agile software now lets people quickly check flight options, see stock prices fluctuate and better manage their online photos and e-mail. Such tools make computing less of a chore because they sit on distant web servers and run over standard browsers.
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/ 25 October 2005
Legendary singer and pianist Shirley Horn, known for her deliberately slow renditions of jazz standards, has died at 71 in the Washington area, a member of her entourage said on Friday. Horn was discovered in 1960 by producer Quincy Jones and legendary trumpeter Miles Davis.
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/ 25 October 2005
Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, has died at age 92. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title of ”mother of the civil rights movement”.
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/ 25 October 2005
Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, has died at age 92. Parks died on Monday evening at her home during the evening of natural causes. She was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title of ”mother of the civil rights movement”.
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/ 24 October 2005
Harriet Miers nominated by President George Bush to fill a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court currently lacks the votes for her confirmation by the US Senate, despite an intense White House campaign to sell her candidacy, lawmakers from both parties acknowledged.
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/ 24 October 2005
Scott Podsednik belted a walk-off home run to seal a 7-6 White Sox victory over Houston on Sunday, insuring Chicago teammate Paul Konerko’s grand slam didn’t go to waste in game two of the World Series. The White Sox seized a two-games-to-none lead in the best-of-seven Major League Baseball championship series, which heads to Houston on Tuesday for game three.
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/ 22 October 2005
In the clearest indication to date that criminal charges against top White House officials may be in the offing, the special prosecutor investigating the CIA leak case has unveiled his own website — one week before his probe was scheduled to wrap up.
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/ 21 October 2005
When Google commanded per share in its August 2004 initial public offering, the prospect of the stock quadrupling in less than 15 months ago seemed inconceivable. It doesn’t appear far-fetched now: Google’s shares hit a new all-time high early on Friday, rising by ,69 to ,89 in morning New York Stock Exchange trading.
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/ 21 October 2005
Apparently Ken still isn’t over Barbie. Almost two years after the closely watched celebrity couple split after a 43-year romance, Ken is considering a makeover in an
effort to win his doll baby back. Mattel made the announcement on Thursday. Russell Arons, vice-president of marketing at Mattel, would say only that fans might see big changes this spring.
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/ 19 October 2005
Washington’s power-broking elite is shaken and stirred, and revolt is brewing over the Dom Perignon and canapés at the latest threat to the United States capital’s everyday life. What can have so vexed the cocktail party set? A new al-Qaeda terror threat? Quagmire in Iraq?
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/ 19 October 2005
Hurricane Wilma, which swelled into an ”extremely dangerous” category-five storm on Wednesday, threatening Mexico and the Caribbean, is the strongest hurricane on record in the Atlantic, the United States National Hurricane Centre said.
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/ 19 October 2005
Two men at the centre of one of the sporting world’s largest drug scandals were sentenced to prison terms on Tuesday by a United States federal court judge on Tuesday. Judge Susan Illston sentenced Victor Conte, founder of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), and Greg Anderson, who served as a personal trainer to Barry Bonds, to penalties of four months and three months in jail respectively.
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/ 19 October 2005
Researchers are exploring the implications of allowing HIV-positive patients to take a break from their medications every weekend.
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/ 19 October 2005
Internet blogs are getting a boost from the big search engines, which make the personal journals more accessible and move them toward mainstream journalism, analysts say. Yahoo this month said it would include blogs on all its news searches, saying it would give readers more access to "grassroots journalism."
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/ 18 October 2005
Jurors in United States death penalty cases are often excluded because of race and gender, are not shown critical evidence and tend to be conviction prone, the Death Penalty Information Centre said on Tuesday in a report. ”While most Americans never serve on a capital jury,” the report said, ”everyone is affected by a system that fails to respect those who do serve and that falls woefully short of justice.”
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/ 18 October 2005
World oil prices shot higher on Monday as Tropical Storm Wilma raised fresh concern over hurricane-battered production in the United States Gulf of Mexico. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in November, jumped $1,73 to close at $64,36 per barrel.
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/ 17 October 2005
For the first time in history, the list used for naming tropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean is running out of names. With the naming of Tropical Storm Wilma on Monday morning, the list of 21 names used this year has reached its end. Wilma is gathering strength and is expected to become a hurricane this week.
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/ 13 October 2005
United States talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey, whose influence can turn the New York Times bestseller list on its head, is having a similar impact on the FBI’s most-wanted list with a campaign to catch fugitive paedophiles. Winfrey launched ”Oprah’s Child Predator Watch List” last week, to almost immediate results.
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/ 13 October 2005
Devery Freeman, a screenwriter who helped create the Writers’ Guild of America and wrote for such TV series as The Thin Man, has died. He was 92. Freeman, who had been ill since having open-heart surgery in March, died on Friday evening in Los Angeles, according to a statement on the guild’s website.
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/ 12 October 2005
A giant pumpkin weighing more than half a tonne has snatched top place in a world championship competition of giant vegetables held in California, organisers said on Tuesday. A retired firefighter won Monday’s World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off for the second year running with his humongous 557,47kg entry.
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/ 12 October 2005
Yahoo! said on Wednesday it will bar chat rooms that promote sex between minors and adults and restrict all chat rooms to users 18 and older. The internet portal also will pre-screen the names of all user-created chat rooms if and when it restores the ability to create them.
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/ 12 October 2005
The final portion of storm-savaged New Orleans was open to residents on Wednesday, with road blocks lifted at a neighbourhood nearly obliterated during hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Mayor Ray Nagin cleared the way for displaced residents to return to the Lower Ninth Ward for the first time since storms and flooding laid waste to the working-class neighborhood.
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/ 12 October 2005
South Africa’s transport parastatal Transnet may need up to R25-billion in funding over the next five years from the financial markets, Transnet group treasurer Swazi Tshabalala told the parliamentary public enterprises portfolio committee on Wednesday.
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/ 12 October 2005
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued a joint report on Wednesday highlighting the plight of thousands of child offenders serving life sentences in United States prisons without hope of parole. At least 2 225 people are currently held under such sentences for crimes committed before they were 18.
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/ 11 October 2005
Three police officers on Monday pleaded not guilty to charges of battery after they were filmed repeatedly beating a 64-year-old man outside a bar in New Orleans. Footage from Associated Press showed Robert Davis being punched in the face, his head striking a wall, before being bundled to the ground by four officers and subjected to blows and kicks.
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/ 11 October 2005
Championships were created to bring together the best players from around the globe. They have turned into an annuity for the world’s top-ranked player. In the year Tiger Woods won his 10th major championship, his play-off victory on Sunday over John Daly in the American Express Championship was his 10th world title since this series began in 1999.
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/ 10 October 2005
Vince began to break down on Monday over the cooler waters of the far eastern Atlantic, less than a day after making this hurricane season the second-busiest on record, forecasters said. The former Category One hurricane weakened to a tropical storm with top sustained winds near 96,6kph, said forecasters at the National Hurricane Centre.
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/ 10 October 2005
Forecasters at the National Hurricane Centre in the United States have struggled for more than a decade to issue accurate storm reports using broken equipment, an overbooked airplane fleet and tight budgets, a newspaper reported on Sunday. Key forecasting equipment used by the centre has broken down or been unavailable for nearly half of the 45 hurricanes that have struck land since 1992.
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/ 10 October 2005
In a phenomenal display of power between golf’s two biggest sluggers, Tiger Woods outlasted John Daly in the American Express Championship because of a one metre putt. Woods made up two shots over the final three holes on Sunday to force a playoff, then won on the second extra hole when Daly three-putted for bogey from 4,5-metres on the 16th, badly pulling his short par putt.
Merck opened its defence on Thursday in the second product liability trial over its arthritis medicine, countering claims that it did not study whether Vioxx might cause more heart ailments than other pain relievers. Merck researcher Dr Briggs Morrison told jurors the company conducted several studies of Vioxx before putting it on the market in May 1999, each concluding that Vioxx posed no threats to heart health.
The United States Congress held an unprecedented hearing on Thursday on India’s Dalits, once known as the ”untouchables,” highlighting what it calls a key human rights issue in the world’s largest democracy. About 200-million of India’s estimated population of a billion people are Dalits, occupying the bottom rung in Hinduism’s 2 500-year-old caste system.