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The Dow Jones Industrial Average, a stock market index used to gauge the performance of American stock exchanges, fell 344.65 at the close of trading Thursday. The exact reason for the drop is unknown, with different news agencies pointing to different causes. The New York Times cites a rise in unemployment numbers released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Labor and a fall in retail sales released by several large corporations. According to the Associated Press, the number of people claiming weekly unemployment benefits rose 15,000 last wee

Canadian former professional wrestler Killer Kowalski died in the early morning hours of August 30 at the age of 81. Kowalski suffered a major heart attack on August 8 and remained in critical condition at a local hospital in Everett, Massachusetts until August 18 when his family took him off of life support. During a career that spanned for 30 years, Kowalski wrestled for several organizations including the National Wrestling Alliance and the American Wrestling Association. In the 1960s and 70's Kowalski wrestled for the World Wide Wrestling

Various questions have been raised about the choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Senator John McCain's choice for Republican vice presidential running mate. There have been doubts over how thoroughly McCain had examined Palin's background before announcing that he had selected her to be his running mate on August 29. McCain's advisers insist that Palin was "thoroughly vetted," a process that would have included a review of all financial and legal records as well as a criminal background check. Palin is the Republican Party's first female

United States hard rock band Great White has filed a settlement offer of US$1 million to families of victims of the Station nightclub fire. 100 people died including band guitarist Ty Longley and over 200 were injured in the February 2003 disaster in Rhode Island. The fire started when band manager Daniel Bichele ignited pyrotechnics towards the beginning of a concert by Great White at the club. Cheap packing foam had been used as soundproofing material to surround the stage, and this ignited. Great White were never charged, but Bichele was gi

United States Senator Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT) delivered an impassioned speech yesterday to Republicans at the 2008 Republican National Convention. His choice to do so angered numerous congressional Democrats, and may lead to sanctions by the party. Lieberman spent 18 years as a Democrat, winning his first Senate race in 1988. After three terms, Lieberman narrowly lost the Democratic primary in the lead-up to the 2006 election. Running instead under the "Connecticut for Lieberman" party banner, Lieberman beat his former democratic opponent Ned

A United Nations (UN) aid plane in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has crashed, killing all seventeen passengers on board. According to a spokesperson for the organisation "The plane was found 15 kilometres (eight miles) northwest of Bukavu airport. There were 15 passengers and two crew on board." Air Serv International, the operator of the aircraft, said that it did not believe there to be any survivors. They also said in the statement that "the staff of Air Serv International express their condolences and deepest sympathy to the

A memorial service has been held in Nova Scotia, Canada to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Swissair Flight 111 disaster. None of the 229 people on board survived the aircraft's impact with the sea on September 2, 1998. Hundreds of search and rescue personnel and local fishermen were mobilised after the crash in St. Margaret's Bay near Halifax to recover fragments of both the aircraft and the victims. The state of the human remains was such that identifying them resulted in what would remain the largest DNA identification operation up

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security was wrong in using the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a reference when deciding whether to allow asylum seekers to stay in the United States. The department used the Wikipedia article named laissez-passer to decide whether the document was a valid form of identification. This is despite the fact that the article had a large orange notice at the top of the article saying that "this article does not cite any references or sources." The Board of Immigratio

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s office announced layoffs of up to 450 state employees and the closure of 25 historic sites and state parks. Fourteen state historic sites are scheduled to be closed October 1. Eleven state parks are slated for closure November 1. A spokesperson for the governor stated that the office had no choice but to make the budget cuts because of a faltering economy and an unbalanced state budget. Included in the cuts were the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), which operates the state parks, the Departm

The families of two members of the crew of a United Kingdom RAF Hawker Siddeley Nimrod which crashed almost exactly two years ago during a mission in Afghanistan are suing their government. None of the twelve crew and two other officers on board Royal Air Force Nimrod XV230 survived the midair explosion. According to a report last year by Assistant Deputy Coroner for Oxford Andrew Walker "The aircraft was in my judgment never airworthy from the first release to service in 1969." The coroner recommended grounding the entire Nimrod fleet, but th

Google announced on Monday that it is launching an open source web browser, dubbed Chrome, to compete with browsers such as Internet Explorer from Microsoft, Firefox from Mozilla, and Safari from Apple. In a post on the company's official blog, Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, an engineering director at Google said Chrome would represent a "fresh take on the browser" and that it believes Chrome "can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web." Google chose to announce the l

The United Kingdom-based mobile Linux developers OpenedHand have announced that they have been acquired by the Intel Corporation, merging the Linux company with the Intel Open Source Technology Center. "We are pleased to announce that OpenedHand Ltd has been acquired by Intel Corporation," said OpenedHand in a statement it released on the acquisition. "The OpenedHand team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Center and will focus on the development of the Moblin Software Platform, the optimized software stack for Intel Atom processors."