AP - The gray cooling tower stands 60 feet above North Korea’s main nuclear reactor complex, the most visible symbol of its atomic weapons program.

AP - Zimbabwe’s one-candidate presidential runoff is already a footnote, with the world looking beyond Friday’s electoral charade to how longtime leader Robert Mugabe can be pushed toward real democracy.

AP - Gaza militants fired two rockets into southern Israel on Thursday, further straining a shaky, week-old truce as Israel kept vital Gaza border crossings closed in response.

AP - After months of stalling, North Korea offered a glimpse of its secretive nuclear program Thursday and was promptly rewarded by President Bush with an easing of trade sanctions and a move to take the communist state off the U.S. terrorism blacklist.

AP - The Internet’s key oversight agency relaxed rules Thursday to permit the introduction of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new Internet domain names to join “.com,” making the first sweeping changes in the network’s 25-year-old addressing system.

AP - Chief Executive Howard Stringer said Sony Corp. will win back its electronic leadership by improving its Internet-linked gadgets, wiping out losses in video games and TVs and pushing services and software, not just hardware.

AP - Although a large Internet service provider has backed away from technology that tracks subscribers’ Web use in order to deliver personalized advertising, two other broadband companies said Wednesday they are still considering whether to deploy it.

AP - The Nintendo DS isn’t just fun and games anymore for English students at Tokyo’s Joshi Gakuen all-girls junior high school. The portable video game console is now being used as a key teaching tool, breaking with traditional Japanese academic methods.

AP - Smart phone maker Research In Motion Ltd.’s fiscal first-quarter profit and revenue more than doubled, fueled by strong sales of its BlackBerry devices, but the company’s forecast for the current period sent its shares down more than 11 percent Thursday.

PC World - ICANN will press ahead with plans to create new top-level domains, including IDNs written in Chinese and Arabic scripts.

AFP - Almost one in two Chinese people now has a mobile phone, while the number of fixed-line subscribers has fallen, state media reported Thursday.

PC World - Microsoft Taiwan, HTC and several others announced a new mobile Internet service platform in Taiwan.

PC World - The LiPS Forum, a mobile Linux group, said its activities will be folded into the LiMo Foundation going forward.

Reuters - Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it has
started selling its new server virtualization software about
six weeks ahead of schedule, putting pressure on market leader
VMware Inc.

Reuters - Chocolate maker Mars Inc, computer
giant IBM and the U.S. Department of Agriculture said
on Thursday they would team up to map the DNA of the cocoa tree
to try to sweeten the crop’s $5 billion market.

PC World - Sony is preparing a non-game service for its PlayStation 3 console that at first glance is similar to one available on…

One great give-a-way for your customer is mouse pads. These fall under the term promotional items. Business concerns* are always in a quest to find a good way to bring forth their advertising slogan in front of possible clients. One excellent method was first developed in 1957. It was a t shirt with an imprint on it. The promotional area on a tshirt is almost 150 square inches which makes this a smashing walking billboard and one of the best ways to get the message in front of the potential customer!

AP - Cell phone company T-Mobile USA is set to launch a nationwide service that lets customers place unlimited domestic calls with their landline phones over a broadband connection.

AP - Wireless systems used by many hospitals to keep track of medical equipment can cause potentially deadly breakdowns in lifesaving devices such as breathing and dialysis machines, researchers reported Tuesday in a study that warned hospitals to conduct safety tests.

AP - Yahoo Inc.’s steadily sinking stock pulled out of its descent Tuesday on reports that the Internet pioneer is reconsidering its recent decision to fall into the arms of online search leader Google Inc. instead of Microsoft Corp.

AP - The cheapest model of Apple Inc.’s new iPhone, which is about to go on sale for $199 in the U.S., costs about $173 to make, according to an estimate by research firm iSuppli Corp.

AP - One of the Internet’s founding fathers and a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission joined forces Tuesday in renewing calls for the U.S. government to more actively expand broadband service.

PC World - One of Japan’s biggest Internet service providers will soon begin imposing 30G-byte daily upload limits on its customers.

Macworld.com - Freeverse on Tuesday announced the release of Jeopardy! Deluxe and Wheel of Fortune Deluxe, two Mac games based on the popular TV game shows. Each is available for download as a free demo; each costs $19.95 to register.

Reuters - Nokia Corp (NOK1V.HE) will add public
wireless LAN access to its handsets in Japan in a bid to keep
pace with smaller Japanese rivals that already provide such
network connections.

PC World - Symbian’s decision to make its source code freely available tips the scales in favor of open-source software in smartphones…

AP - A bomb exploded inside Sadr City’s district council building Tuesday, killing 10 people, including four Americans working to restore local government and services in the former Shiite militia stronghold.

AP - A water lily painting by Claude Monet sold for more than $80 million Tuesday, breaking the auction record for the French impressionist artist, Christie’s said.

AP - Palestinian militants fired three homemade rockets into southern Israel on Tuesday, threatening to unravel a cease-fire days after it began, and Israel responded by closing vital border crossings into Gaza.

AP - President Robert Mugabe refused Tuesday to give into pressure from Africa and the West, saying the world can “shout as loud as they like” but he would not cancel this week’s runoff election even though his opponent quit the race.

AP - Dozens of scared children filed silently into the bare room, their eyes on the cracks in the floor. One by one, in low voices, they told of being tortured by the Kenyan army because they were suspected of aiding rebels. They told of being beaten and made to shake hands with corpses. They told of being forced to crawl through barbed wire tunnels and of genitals squeezed by pliers.

AFP - Rafael Nadal, Maria Sharapova and Venus Williams moved into the Wimbledon second round on Tuesday but men’s fourth seed Nikolay Davydenko crashed to an embarrassingly limp defeat.

AP - As of Tuesday, June 24, 2008, at least 4,106 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

AP - Mexico has agreed to extradite a reputed leader of a Tijuana-based drug cartel to the U.S.

Reuters - Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan
Tsvangirai urged the United Nations on Wednesday to isolate
President Robert Mugabe and said a peacekeeping force was
needed in Zimbabwe.

AP - NATO says an explosion has killed one of its soldiers on a patrol in southern Afghanistan.

AFP - British energy giant BG Group on Tuesday launched a hostile 6.6-billion-pound (13.8-billion Australian dollar) bid for Origin Energy, which if successful, would be one of the biggest foreign takeovers of an Australian firm.

AP - In less than a day, an electrical storm unleashed nearly 8,000 lightning strikes that set more than 800 wildfires across Northern California a rare example of “dry lightning” that brought little or no rain but plenty of sparks to the state’s parched forests and grasslands.

AP - The weakest spot left along the swollen Mississippi River may be the Pin Oak levee, a barrier so tenuous that soil slides down its slope.

AP - In one of the biggest conservation deals in U.S. history, the nation’s largest producer of cane sugar reached a tentative agreement Tuesday to get out of the business and sell its nearly 300 square miles in the Everglades to the state of Florida for $1.75 billion.

AP - Palestinian militants on Tuesday fired three homemade rockets into southern Israel, the first such attack since a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza militants took effect last week.

AP - An Israeli police officer fatally shot himself Tuesday at an airport departure ceremony for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, sparking fear of an assassination attempt and prompting bodyguards to whisk away Sarkozy and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, officials said.

AP - A bomb struck a district council building Tuesday in Baghdad’s Shiite militia stronghold of Sadr City, killing at least 10 people, including four Americans two soldiers and two government employees, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

AP - Outraged at the turmoil in Zimbabwe, the U.N. Security Council declared that a fair presidential vote is impossible because of a “campaign of violence” waged by President Robert Mugabe’s government.

AP - Drug traffickers in well-armed desert convoys roll across the border from Afghanistan. Standing in their way are Iranian soldiers and drug agents trying to choke off one of the world’s busiest pipelines for opium and heroin.

AFP - The pound, having earlier come under heavy pressure following weak mortgage lending figures from the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), reversed losses Tuesday to surge to a daily high of 1.9723 US dollars.

AP - Countries at a one-day international conference Tuesday agreed to commit $242 million to help strengthen the Palestinian Authority’s police force and court system, the German foreign minister said.

AP - President Michelle Bachelet pushed to permanently ban whaling along Chile’s sprawling coast at the opening Monday of the weeklong International Whaling Commission meeting.

AP - More than 840 wildfires sparked by an “unprecedented” lightning storm are burning a swath of Northern California, alarming the governor and requiring the help of firefighters from Nevada and Oregon.

AP - As towns upriver watched the Mississippi River slowly begin to recede, a few farther south focused on holding on for a few more days furiously filling sandbags and keeping watch over saturated levees struggling to hold back the flooded river.

AP - A U.S. Supreme Court decision paving the way for a 670-mile federal fence along the U.S.-Mexico border drew swift criticism from environmentalists, who promised to make another legal stand in Texas.

AP - The story made headlines almost immediately: High school girls in this New England fishing town had made a pact to get pregnant. Now the account is under fire. The city’s mayor on Monday debunked the pact theory originally stated by the high school principal.

AP - A man whose life was turned upside-down by a wrongful arrest and weeks in jail should have been given access to a lawyer sooner so he could have shown the arrest was erroneous, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday.

AP - A man who led police to the charred remains of his two children was charged with capital murder on Monday.

AP - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is asking California members to join the effort to amend that state’s constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

AP - The third trial of an alleged member of a swingers club accused of forcing children into sex shows was postponed Monday amid allegations that the foster father to the young victims molested other children.

AP - An autistic man who could barely speak and had wandered off without medicine for his transplanted kidney likely had just hours to live when he was found after a week in the woods, a doctor said.

AP - Firefighters from neighboring states arrived to help Monday after an “unprecedented” lightning storm sparked more than 800 wildfires, from Big Sur to wine country to Humboldt County.

AP - A top adviser to John McCain said another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a “big advantage” for the Republican presidential candidate, drawing a sharp rebuke Monday from both the presumed GOP nominee and Democrat Barack Obama.

AP - As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement’s biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democratic presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution.

AP - Divers managed to get inside an upside-down ferry Tuesday but found only bodies and no survivors three days after the vessel capsized during a powerful typhoon with more than 800 people aboard, officials said.

AP - Zimbabwe’s opposition leader took refuge in the Dutch Embassy after pulling out of the presidential runoff, and the U.N. Security Council condemned a “campaign of violence” in the African nation that has made a fair election impossible.

AP - An autistic man who could barely speak and had wandered off without medicine for his transplanted kidney likely had just hours to live when he was found after a week in the woods, a doctor said.

AP - Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world’s only hope is drastic action.

AP - Months after returning to the radio with a pledge to mend the wounds caused by his comments about a women’s basketball team, Don Imus is once again defending on-air remarks regarding race. During an on-air conversation Monday about the arrests of suspended Dallas Cowboys cornerback Adam Jones, Imus asked, “What color is he?”

AP - Authorities say an inmate trying to flee a Texas city jail crashed through the ceiling into a police chief’s empty office.

AP - Zimbabwe’s opposition leader took refuge in the Dutch Embassy after pulling out of the presidential runoff, and dozens of his supporters were hustled away by police in a raid on party headquarters Monday.

AP - Men and women can openly study and party together for the first time in years at Basra University, free from the threat of Shiite gunmen enforcing extreme Islamic views.

AP - With the debris of more than 50 years of climbing oxygen canisters, tents, backpacks and even some bodies Mount Everest has been called the world’s highest garbage dump.

AP - U.S.-led forces rained fire for two days on militants near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, officials said Monday, killing about 55 insurgents and underscoring how fighting with Taliban insurgents is escalating.

AP - Two teams of rescuers prepared Monday to dive into typhoon-roiled waters off the Philippines to find a way inside a capsized ferry in a desperate effort to locate some 800 people believed to be aboard.

Reuters - Canadian military and police
are investigating after a package containing a brand new hand
grenade, belonging to the army, was found in a suburban
backyard, police said on Monday.

AP - A disgruntled local official opened fire Monday on U.S. soldiers attending a municipal council meeting southeast of Baghdad, killing two of them and wounding four other Americans, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

AP - U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said Monday the United States wants to open an office in Latin America to monitor food safety.

Reuters - Judges at the International Criminal
Court will consider on Tuesday releasing their first suspect
after they suspended his trial over access to evidence in a
blow for the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal.

AP - The White House said North Korea has a Thursday “deadline” to hand in a long-awaited accounting of its nuclear past, but warned the paperwork could be delayed yet again.