Strauss-Kahn, maid don't have deal yet: lawyers

NEW YORK: Lawyers for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former IMF chief, shot down reports Friday that he was ready to pay $6 million to a Manhattan maid accusing him of sexual assault -- but confirmed that he was negotiating.In a statement seeking to dampen media speculation over an out-of-court settlement of the maid's civil suit, the lawyers stressed that Strauss-Kahn was talking,...

Read More..

Cyber Monday rings up record U.S. sales (week in review)

This year's Cyber Monday was one for the record books. Market analyst ComScore reported that spending in the U.S. on Monday reached $1.465 billion, up 17 percent from a year ago, "representing the heaviest [U.S.] online spending day in history and the second day this season (in addition toBlack Friday) to surpass $1 billion in sales."ComScore said that the top category for sales was digital content...

Read More..

Pictures: Inside the World's Most Powerful Laser

Photograph courtesy Damien Jemison, LLNLLooking like a portal to a science fiction movie, preamplifiers line a corridor at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF).Preamplifiers work by increasing the energy of laser beams—up to ten billion times—before these beams reach the facility's target chamber.The project's lasers are tackling "one of physics' grand...

Read More..

Mo. Couple Wins Half of Powerball Jackpot

The lucky winners of half of the record $587.5 million Powerball jackpot have been identified as Mark and Cindy Hill of Dearborn, Mo., their working-class lives suddenly taking a turn to the financial stratosphere.Cindy Hill, who with her husband has three adult sons and a 6-year-old daughter adopted from China, purchased the ticket at a Trex Mart gas station in Dearborn."I...

Read More..

Leaping shark scores big air, but no dinner

Flora Graham, deputy editor, newscientist.com(Image: Dana Allen/Caters news)Despite its spectacular leap, this great white shark is going home with an empty stomach. The seal that it has crushed in its jaws is a rubber decoy, created by the photographer, Dana Allen, to tempt it out of the sea. The shark was pictured in False Bay, off Cape Town in South Africa. It's common for great whites to leap...

Read More..

Long hard road for Spain in recession: OECD

MADRID: Spain is engulfed in a long recession with little hope of a quick recovery and its towering unemployment rate will soar further, the OECD club of industrialised nations said Thursday.Spain must quickly fix its banks to avert the "substantial risk" of being cut off from external financing and plunging into an even deeper recession, the body warned in a report."The economy is undergoing...

Read More..

Military judge accepts plea terms in Bradley Manning case

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of sharing documents with WikiLeaks that were eventually released on the Internet, is now one step closer to handling some of the claims brought against him.Military judge Colonel Denise Lind today accepted the language used to describe seven charges to which Manning could plead guilty. The charges include Manning willfully sending videos, war logs, and...

Read More..

Caterpillar Fungus Has Anti-Inflammatory Properties

In the Tibetan mountains, a fungus attaches itself to a moth larva burrowed in the soil. It infects and slowly consumes its host from within, taking over its brain and making the young caterpillar move to a position from which the fungus can grow and spore again. (Learn about other fungi that invade brains.)Sounds like something out of science fiction, right? But for ailing Chinese consumers...

Read More..

Petraeus Tells Friend He 'Screwed Up Royally'

One of David Petraeus' closest friends says the former CIA director admitted that he "screwed up royally" by having an affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell.Retired Brigadier Gen. James Shelton has been friends with Petraeus for more than three decades and reached to out to him after he resigned from the CIA. Shelton told ABC News that the former four-star general wrote...

Read More..

Europe in 2050: a survivor's guide to climate change

* Required fields * First name * Last name * Country * Email address * Password Password must contain only letters and numbers, and be at least 8 characters * Confirm password...

Read More..