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Many people made redundant will be able to defer part of their mortgage payments for up to two years, Gordon Brown says.
The Federal Reserve's Beige Book paints a bleak picture of the US economy, with weaker economic activity across the country.
England's cricketers will fly to Abu Dhabi on Thursday ahead of resuming their tour of India - if happy with security plans.
The family of a New York man who was trampled to death the day after Thanksgiving by a stampede of bargain hunting Wal-Mart shoppers has filed a wrongful death lawsuit.
Kanye responds to Colbert's "Operation Humble Kanye," a plan to knock West's album off the top of the iTunes charts today at 5pm.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, I boarded Jet Blue ($440) for Austin to spend some time with Katy and Matt Culmo, who own a store called By George. I wanted to see how an independent retailer was coping with the recession, and I thought I'd get a more honest view outside of hyper, impress-me-silly New York. At [...].
Ok, so here is the difference between paid studies and independent research. How stupid do they think we are? A paid study that finds that laser printers are harmless sounds suspicious in itself. Looks like we should be a more careful how we handle laser printers.
Xbox 360 had an excellent year, although most of the glory was shared with other gaming platforms.
A new fossil species of flying reptile - with a wingspan the size of a family car - has been uncovered by scientists.
Bullet-riddled body of Henry Blanco's sibling is found in Venezuela
A new survey finds that the next generation of leaders have a somewhat casual relationship with the truth.
The first of more than 100 countries begin signing a treaty which will ban current designs of cluster bombs.
The songs that whales and dolphins use to communicate, orient themselves and find mates are being drowned out by human-made noises in the world's oceans, U.N. officials and environmental groups said Wednesday.
An intricate, kaleidoscopic, all-embracing history of 20th-century music from Mahler to La Monte Young is the winner of this year's Guardian first book award. Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise was the clear and undisputed winner of the £10,000 prize, which has been presented at a ceremony in central London tonight.The chair of the judging panel, Guardian literary editor Claire Armitstead, said: "In some quarters this book has been seen as not having a popular appeal. Our prize ? which, uniquely, relies on readers' groups in the early stages of judging ? proves that, on the contrary, there is a huge appetite among readers for clear, serious but accessible books."According to one judge: "Where Ross lifts his book above the 'expert' and impressive to the 'good read' category is in the way he wears his learning lightly, never clutches for false or contrived ways of explaining music, and never dumbs down in order to explain."One of the members of the Waterstone's reading groups, who helped in the judging process, said: "Every time I felt overwhelmed by the technicalities, along came a sublime metaphor or simile that would light up the prose."Ross, who is the music critic of the New Yorker, has distilled a lifetime's enthusiasm and learning into a rich narrative of musical history, setting the works of Mahler, Schoenberg, John Cage and the rest into their cultural and political contexts ? but also giving a vivid sense of what the music he describes actually sounds and feels like.Of all the artforms, modern and contemporary classical music is often seen as the most rebarbative. Ross brushes aside the mythology of 20th-century music's "inaccessibility" as he charts its meandering histories. Along the way, fascinating connections are made: hip-hop has more in common with Janacek than you might think; Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners; Gershwin, in turn, was an ardent fan of Alban Berg and kept an autographed photo of the composer of Lulu in his apartment. If there is an overarching idea to the book, it is perhaps contained in Berg's pronouncement to Gershwin: "Mr Gershwin, music is music." Ross, 40, was born in Washington DC, and studied English and history at Harvard. An enthusiastic teenage musician and student broadcaster, he began writing music criticism after university and in 1996 was appointed music critic of the New Yorker. His blog ? also called The Rest Is Noise ? has been a trailblazer in harnessing the internet as a way of amplifying (often literally) his writing on music.The New York Review of Books described The Rest Is Noise as "by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music". The Economist noted: "No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording." Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican and a former Observer music critic, said: "At a time when people are still talking about 20th-century music as if it were a problem, here is a lucid and entertaining book about what I regard as some of the greatest music ever written. It's a wonderful way to advance the cause of 20th-century music to an ordinary, intelligent general reader. It's the ideal mix of enthusiasm and information."This year's judging panel comprised novelist Roddy Doyle; broadcaster and novelist Francine Stock; poet Daljit Nagra; the historian David Kynaston; novelist Kate Mosse and Guardian deputy editor, Katharine Viner. Stuart Broom of Waterstone's also joined the deliberations, speaking as the representative of the readers' groups.The other books on the shortlist were Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes; Ross Raisin's God's Own Country; Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole (which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker prize) and Owen Matthews's Stalin's Children. Previous winners of the prize have included Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (2005) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000).Guardian first book awardHistoryMusicAwards and prizesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The plan, the brainchild of the former Silicon Valley software executive Shai Agassi, is an attempt to overcome the major hurdles to electric cars.
Gov. David A. Paterson and Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo assailed the lack of women among the list of seven nominees for the post of chief judge of the State Court of Appeals.
Yahoo is yet again the subject of takeover rumors, this time with a new twist: a former head of AOL is supposedly trying to line up backers for a bid to take the company private. It's scenario that makes sense, but will be tough to pull off given the state of the economy.
One of the conjoined twins separated at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital has died, the hospital says.
Chertoff offered reporters some bits of advice for his announced successor in the new Obama administration.
A new study shows that even for senior citizens age is just a state of mind.
A congressional investigation into weapons of mass destruction today offered a chilling prediction of terrorists mounting an attack using biological or nuclear weapons within the next five years.The six-month inquiry singles out Pakistan as one of the likeliest sources of such an attack. The target could be the US or some other part of the world.The report, by the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, concludes that "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013".It adds that "terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon".President George Bush welcomed the report, saying the threat posed was the greatest facing the US and was "dangerously real". He said that after the 9/11 attacks, he had put in place policies tackling the threat and he was leaving a good foundation for his successor.The incoming Barack Obama administration, which is to make proliferation of weapons of mass destruction a priority, was briefed on Capitol Hill today about the findings in the 132-page report.The commission, which was led by the former Democratic senator Bob Graham and by former Democratic senator Jim Talent, was given six months to complete the report. It follows on from the work of the commission that investigated the 9/11 attack.Graham told reporters at the press conference that a biological or nuclear attack within the next five years was not inevitable and the commission's reports included a series of recommendations, that if implemented, could diminish the threat. Recommendations include creation of a White House post focusing on proliferation and more emphasis on diplomatic efforts.The team's remit ranged from lack of security at biological labs in the US to the safety of nuclear stockpiles in Russia. It conducted 250 interviews with scientists, analysts, intelligence agencies and the military.The report concludes the risk from biological or nuclear weapons is higher than sceptical foreign policy and defence analysts have suggested. Those analysts had pointed to the complexity of transporting biological or nuclear weapons and the limitations of a nuclear "dirty" bomb, whose radius of damage is minimal compared with missile-delivered warheads.The report disagrees, saying: "No mission could be timelier. The simple reality is that the risks that confront us today are evolving faster than our multilayered responses. Many thousands of dedicated people across all agencies of our government are working hard to protect this country, and their efforts have had a positive impact. But the terrorists have been active, too and in our judgment America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing."It adds that much dangerous biological and nuclear material around the globe is "poorly secured and thus vulnerable to theft by those who would put these materials to harmful use, or would sell them on the black market to potential terrorists."As well as the threat from stateless militant groups, the commission expresses concern about the danger posed by proliferation of nuclear weapons to states such as Iran, saying the Obama administration must stop it from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.It points to Pakistan, both at the state level and among stateless groups, as one of the areas of most concern. "Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan," the report says.Talent told the press conference in Washington today: "It is the epicentre of a lot of these dangers." He said the report had been drawn up before the Mumbai attacks.The commission recommends that Pakistan be top priority for the Obama administration in terms of terrorism and proliferation. Proposals include eliminating terrorist safe havens through military, economic, and diplomatic means, securing nuclear and biological materials in Pakistan, countering and defeating extremist ideology, and constraining a nascent nuclear arms race in Asia.Other recommendations include strengthening the non-proliferation treaty and other international safeguards, creating a US national security force appropriate to the 21st century and developing a more coherent strategy for countering ideologies that leads to terrorism.At home, the commission was disturbed at the apparent lack of security at laboratories dealing with dangerous biological materials. Government investigators, sent to check on the vulnerability of such sites were able gain access to the outside of these buildings and observe work inside.It was lucky that they were from the government and not al-Qaida operatives as these were precisely the lethal trove that the terrorists have been seeking for years, the report says.The government investigators watched a pedestrian simply stroll into one of the buildings through an unguarded loading bay.The commission recommended tighter oversight of the 400 research facilities and 15,000 staff engaged in such work. Another recommendation is the establishment of an anthrax preparedness strategy.Global terrorismAl-QaidaObama White HouseUnited StatesPakistanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Passengers on a luxury cruise liner attacked by pirates said they were surprised by the assailants' boldness and described hearing the "Pop! Pop! Pop!" of the pirates' rifles firing at the ship.
During demonstration, Vietnamese company shows that face recognition-based authentication in laptops from Lenovo, Toshiba, and Asus may not be an effective security measure.
Australians are consuming too much salt, say nutritionists who blame not only fast food but also healthier alternatives such as canned vegetables and baked beans. Less than 5 per cent of all sausages and beef burgers sold in the nation's supermarkets contained acceptable levels of salt, a Nutrition Society of Australia conference has also heard.