WORLD powers called for an immediate end to violence after massive Israeli air strikes on Gaza and rocket attacks by Palestinian militants, but the US said it "holds Hamas responsible"……..
Palestinians in Gaza's densely populated capital are in a state of panic as Israel continues its air assault and readies tanks at the border, a United Nations humanitarian spokeswoman told CNN on Monday....
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development says even those who escape redundancy face pay freezes.
Pope Benedict XVI has come under fire from a leading Vatican watcher as "The Pope who says No" following a series of "negative" Vatican statements on homosexuality, the disabled and bio-ethics….
For, apparently, gay people threaten the planet in a comparable way to the destruction of the rainforest. I guess the idea is that if we all were gay, then we wouldn't be making any babies.
The Queen will use her Christmas Day message to voice her concern at the "insecurity" millions are feeling in recession-hit Britain.
Applications for home loans more than doubled in the two weeks after the Federal Reserve said it would buy mortgage bonds to help stabilise the market, prompting mortgage rates to fall by more than three-quarters of a percentage point….
The global credit crunch set off by Wall Street’s collapse is spilling over into domestic banking systems and squeezing capital resources for corporate investment…..
Since the recession began a year ago, many states have seen increases in the Medicaid rolls just as tax revenues are falling below projections.
The furloughs will begin in February and will last through June 2010, Schwarzenegger said in an executive order. He also ordered all departments to cut 10 percent of their workforce costs, through firings if necessary…
There are many reasons to anticipate that the incoming Obama administration and the new Congress will let sleeping dogs lie. 
A joint report by the White House budget office and Treasury Department said that much of the increase in obligations came from an unexpected jump in veterans benefits liabilities, while revenues remained mostly flat because of the recession that began a year ago…..
“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”
"He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago.
The Madoff situation is, at a time of mass redemptions and dwindling returns, what hedge funds needed least. A spectacular scandal causing huge losses that undermines trust in the industry. The financier's apparent scam, which may have cost investors $50bn....
The decision came after a series of deeply personal and political conversations, in which Kennedy, whom friends describe as unflashy but determined, wrestled with whether to give up what has been a lifetime of avoiding the spotlight...
Bush appeared at a Baghdad news conference yesterday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and said there is more work to be done with the war now in its sixth year...
Many US retailers posted sharply lower November sales at stores open at least a year, prompting some investors to pour into the sector on hopes the dismal results signaled a bottom for share values...
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was flying to New Delhi on Tuesday to try to ease tension between India and Pakistan that has surged over the Mumbai attacks and put at risk U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region...
“...My own sense is Pakistan has everything that gives you an international migraine. It has nuclear weapons, it has terrorism, extremists, corruption, very poor and it’s in a location that’s really, really important to us. And now with this issue with India. So, I think that president Bush and the secretary of state, who’s on her way to India now, have a very big job ahead of them,” said Ms Albright...
"Without appropriate treatment, half of children with HIV will die from an HIV-related cause by their second birthday," Ann Veneman, executive director of the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, said in a statement....
They will be armed with proof that they are working to restructure their stumbling businesses and will be able to emerge from the current deep slump as viable companies focused on developing new technology to build more environmentally friendly vehicles....
FBI agents were preparing to fly to India to investigate the bloody attacks in the Indian financial capital as the State Department warned U.S. citizens still in the city that their lives remain at risk...
The lack of knowledge is paralyzing. The images of a police van firing at its citizens flooded all our minds. The people we trust the most to keep us safe may not be who we think....
As the sun sets on the Bush administration, the survival rite known as burrowing is under way. Burrowing is when favored political appointees are transformed into civil servants and granted instant tenure on the federal payroll...
...Meanwhile, two widely reported choices for Obama's national security team were confirmed by ABC news: Robert Gates is said to be staying on temporarily as defence secretary, and former Nato commander James Jones is tipped to become the national security adviser...
Claire Jones said she knew she was pregnant from an affair with a colleague but thought the pain she suffered in the early hours of December 28 was from diarrhoea....bmp)
Barack Obama has outlined his plan to create 2.5m jobs in his first two years in office with an ambitious spending programme on roads, schools and and renewable energy....
Shares in Citigroup fell by nearly 18 per cent in early trading as the US bank called a board meeting to discuss its future stability, including whether to find a merger partner or sell-off some of its assets.....
Pakistan's foreign ministry summoned U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson on Thursday to lodge a formal protest against another suspected U.S. missile strike on its territory, an act the country's prime minister called a violation of his nation's sovereignty...
Thousands of inmates admit they're in the U.S. illegally, but even those convicted of violent crimes are often released right back onto Houston's streets... The Story
Now more bad news for the "King of Pop" Michael Jackson. The downfall continues...
A state of emergency has been declared in Los Angeles, where wildfires are threatening the power supply. Around 10,000 residents have been placed under mandatory evacuation orders...
Similar demonstrations across the country — in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., and even in hinterlands like Fargo, North Dakota. Advocates said the time for change had come, as it has already in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the only states now that allow gay marriages.
Said "a deep recession is now inevitable and the possibility of a depression cannot be ruled out. Recent IMF credit facility not large enough to stabilize markets...."
Marriage, as defined by the civil law, is currently available to same-sex couples in six countries, and parts of a seventh (but not at the national level in that country). The Netherlands was the first country to allow same-sex marriage in 2001. Same-sex marriages are also legal in Belgium, Canada, Norway, South Africa and Spain, along with two states in the United States: Massachusetts and Connecticut.
European markets opened lower Thursday following earlier sell-offs across Asia, while new figures showed that the German economy -- Europe's biggest -- has slipped into recession in the third quarter....
The figure outstripped forecasts, with analysts polled by Reuters expecting initial claims to be only 484,000. The claims were last at this high a level in the week ended Sept. 29, 2001, when they were 517,000....jpg)
TMZ On The Set 
When Ann Dunham, a quiet 18-year-old college freshman from Kansas, married a brilliant, charismatic Kenyan economics student named Barack Hussein Obama in 1961, mixed-race marriages were illegal in 16 of the United States, including Texas.
Palin spent "tens of thousands of dollars" on additional clothing, makeup and jewelry for herself and her family, including $40,000 in luxury goods for her husband....
