Sunday, August 1, 2010

Antelope Valley, California – The Crown Fire that has burned through 13,980 acres in the High Desert of Southern California since 2:32 pm (2232 UTC) Thursday was at 82% containment Saturday evening, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Former United States vice president Al Gore will not be facing assault charges due to allegations made by a masseuse in 2006, according to the Portland, Oregon district attorney's office.

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Officials say the bus was returning from the Dead Sea to the Jordanian capital of Amman, when it overturned on a steep turn near the Dead Sea. The two women killed were employees of the United Nations Development Program.

Saturday, July 31, 2010

US President Barack Obama test drove a Chevrolet Volt Friday during a visit to a General Motors plant in Michigan. The visit was part of a larger trip to the Detroit area to discuss the progress of Obama's bailout of the auto industry earlier in his administration.

As the president toured the factory, managers invited him to test drive the Volt, which will soon be manufactured there. After consulting reluctant top aides and Secret Service personnel, Obama accepted. "I hope it has an air bag," said press secretary Robert Gibbs. Obama hopped into the car with assembly manager Teri Quigley, buckled his seat belt, and crept forward about ten feet (three meters). As he got out he remarked that the ride was "pretty smooth".

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Riots were ignited in Afghanistan yesterday, after a deadly crash involving a U.S. sports utility vehicle claimed the lives of several Afghan civilians.

Saturday, July 31, 2010

The worst flooding in 80 years in Pakistan has left at least 800 people dead, and affected over a million more. The floods were caused by heavy monsoon rains and have destroyed homes in the country, especially in the northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Saturday, July 31, 2010

The US government announced Friday that economic growth in the USA has slowed to 2.4% in the second quarter as the economy struggles with high unemployment and the aftermath of the worst recession since the 1930's.

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Wednesday marked the 100th day since the beginning of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and although the leaking well was recently capped, the estimated three million or more barrels of oil already in the Gulf of Mexico are still causing trouble for many residents of the Gulf coast.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Three US troops died in two separate blasts yesterday, and three more died today, increasing the American death toll in Afghanistan for July to 66, and making this month the deadliest month for American involvement in the nine-year war.

Friday, July 30, 2010

A medical helicopter crashed into a fence just outside a house in Tucson, Arizona on Wednesday afternoon, killing all three crew members on board. The crash occurred at 1:42 p.m. Arizona time (21:42 UTC) at the intersection of Glenn Street and Park Avenue. Eyewitness Ricardo Carrasco said that he saw the rotors stop working and the helicopter start plummeting towards the ground, with the pilot attempting to steer it away from the house.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the helicopter was a Eurocopter AS350B3 flown in the LifeNet Arizona fleet. It was operated by the Colorado-based Air Methods Corporation, which specializes in flying emergency medical helicopters.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Antelope Valley, California – A huge wildfire that has been burning in the High Desert of Southern California since 2:00 pm (2200 UTC) yesterday continues to threaten residents in the city of Palmdale in the Antelope Valley region of the Los Angeles County this afternoon. Mandatory evacuation orders have been set in place, affecting 2,000 homes.

Friday, July 30, 2010

French prosecutors confirmed on Thursday that nursing assistant Dominique Cottrez killed her eight newborn infants and buried their remains. Prosecutors called the case "non-standard... given the large number of newborns."

Friday, July 30, 2010

As many as 140 people are feared dead after a boat sank on the Kasai River, a tributary of the Congo River, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Friday, July 30, 2010

A Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, operated by the United States Air Force, crashed on Wednesday near Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska at about 6:15 pm (0215 Thursday UTC), killing all four crew members. The plane was practicing for the 2010 Arctic Thunder air show.

These facts were confirmed by Air Force Lt. Gen. Dana Atkins, Commander of Alaskan Command NORAD, in an impromptu press conference later in the evening. Col. John McMullen, commander of the 3rd Wing (under whose authority the plane belonged), announced the four deaths on Thursday. Three were members of the U.S. Air National Guard, one was active duty. Names are being withheld pending the notification of family members.

Friday, July 30, 2010

On Tuesday, Apple Inc. introduced a new peripheral, the Magic Touchpad, and refreshed its line of iMac and Mac Pro computers, as well as the Apple Cinema Display.

The Magic Trackpad, a multi-touch trackpad for Macintosh computers, allows end users to use certain gestures to control on-screen actions. It supports gestures already seen on the MacBook and MacBook Pro trackpads, as well as the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, such as swiping, tap-to-click, and pinch-to-zoom. However, the Magic Trackpad also supports physical clicking and supports one- and two-button commands. The Magic Trackpad, which is retailed for US$69, connects wirelessly to a computer using Bluetooth technology and has a claimed four months of battery life. At 5.17 inches (13.13 centimetres) long and 5.12 inches (13 centimetres) wide, the glass and aluminium device is slightly larger than Apple's laptop trackpads.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Shirley Sherrod, an African-American employee of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) who was ousted last week, has said that she will "definitely sue" conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart over a video clip posted online at BigGovernment.com, operated by Breitbart, that made her appear racist.

Formerly the director of rural development in Georgia, Sherrod was referred to on Breitbart's site as a "racist govt employee," and the video had been edited to make her appear to have discriminated against Caucasians. Sherrod spoke in March of this year at an NAACP meeting. The clip edited from the original video footage of this meeting misrepresents Sherrod as deliberately failing to support a white farmer because of his race. In reality, the full video revealed that Sherrod was speaking about racial reconciliation and the lessons she learned after the episode. However, the USDA asked Sherrod to resign before the full video was released. The farmer mentioned in the video and his wife later stated that Sherrod had actually helped to save their farm, and after the full video was made public, US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and US President Barack Obama apologised and Vilsack offered Sherrod a new job with the USDA. However, Sherrod said that she has not decided whether to accept the new position.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

The Criminal Investigation Department of the Royal Gibraltar Police (RGP) is carrying out investigations following the discovery of a body at a house in Cumberland Road in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

An RGP spokesman confirmed that a body, that of a British woman in her 50s who lived in Gibraltar, had been found, but he refused to give further details, telling reporters that the victim's next of kin had not yet been informed. He went on to say that the RGP "are dealing with this as a suspicious death". The Gibraltar Chronicle reported that the woman had sustained a wound.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Ivy Bean, thought to have been the oldest person using the popular social networking site Twitter, has died at age 104.

By the end of her life, Bean had 53,535 followers (a term used on Twitter to indicate you are watching a person's posts) on the site and was something of an internet phenomenon. In 2008, she became known as the oldest person on Facebook, a title held previously by a 97-year-old French man. Bean frequently updated her Twitter page with videos and descriptions of activities in her daily life that included her winning of the Gold Medal in Frisbee in the Over-75 Olympics in Bradford, Northern England as well as recipes and meeting former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

A recent scientific review, involving more than 300,000 people across several previous studies, has revealed that inadequate social networking and frequent isolation can have negative effects on a person's health equal to that caused by smoking and alcohol abuse. It was found that those who experience sufficient social interactions were 50 per cent more likely to be alive when re-examined eight years later than those who were more socially isolated.

The scientists on the project ranked having low-quality relationships with friends and family as equivalent to frequent substance abuse (that is to say, 15 cigarettes a day or heavy alcohol consumption) but worse for a person's health than not participating in exercise and being obese.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims Paul the octopus, who correctly guessed the outcomes of eight matches of the World Cup, is a sign of decay of Western culture.