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A unanimous vote made Senator Barack Obama the first African-American to become a major party nominee for president.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. accepted the nomination for vice president with criticism of Senator John McCain.

Even before he entered public life, Barack Obama began honing his political, mental and emotional skills.

More than 200 militants captured in Iraq and Afghanistan over two years have been passed to their countries’ intelligence services.

Russia’s representative to NATO, Dmitri O. Rogozin, often derided for his forceful style, is now taken more seriously.

Police say a bomb hit a van carrying prisoners in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least eight people.

The results of a telephone survey conducted by The New York Times show that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg would find ample support in the City Council for a proposal to overturn the term limit laws.

The accounts of Asif Ali Zardari, who is expected to become Pakistan’s president, had been frozen in 1997 at the request of Pakistani authorities investigating Mr. Zardari for corruption.

The extreme secrecy surrounding talks between the most senior American and Pakistani commanders on Tuesday underscores how gravely the two nations regard the militant threat.

To help prop up their sagging economy, officials in Sarasota, Fla., are trying with all their civic might to poach the Red Sox’ spring training operation from Fort Myers.

Top Breaking News Stories from CBSNews.com

Presidential contender Barack Obama defended his decision to travel to Europe and the Middle East, saying that problems encountered by Americans at home are often best dealt with by working with allies overseas.

Federal banking regulators closed 28 branches of 1st National Bank of Nevada and First Heritage Bank, operating in Nevada, Arizona and California. Regulators said they will reopen on Monday as Mutual of Omaha Bank branches.

The mother of a missing 2-year-old Orlando girl told family that she didn't know the whereabouts of her child in a contentious telephone call from jail released Friday.

A House Judiciary Committee hearing addressing an impeachment resolution against President Bush went to great pains to insist the purpose of the meeting was not to vote to remove Mr. Bush from office.

A Congressional report estimates the U.S. has spent $648 billion in Iraq, while Vietnam cost $686 in 2008 dollars.

Parents and scientists have raised concerns about vaccines over the years, but many independent experts have sided with government officials who say there's no possible connection. But how "independent" are they? Sharyl Attkisson investigates.

Sirius Satellite Radio will buyout XM Radio form $3.3 billion after a 3-2 FCC ruling approving the deal.

John McCain, ridiculing Barack Obama for "the audacity of hopelessness" in his policies on Iraq, said Friday that the entire Middle East could have plunged into war had U.S. troops been withdrawn as his rival advocated.

The FDA has linked raw jalapenos and serranos from Mexico to the nationwide salmonella outbreak that has sickened nearly 1,300 people.

The number of households facing the foreclosure process more than doubled in the second quarter compared to a year ago, according to Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc.

California became the first state to ban trans fats from restaurants after several cities started the trend in the last couple of years.

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose "last lecture" about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, has died. He was 47.

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain called on China to free Tibetan prisoners as he met with the Dalai Lama.

Nutritionist Keri Glassman told how to stretch one dinner into a week's worth of lunches for work, on The Early Show.

Early Show viewers got a culinary tour of the Mediterranean Saturday - via Denver - from our plaza!

The three teens, who are white, allegedly beat an illegal immigrant to death in Pennsylvania. They are being charged as adults.

MSNBC.com is a leader in breaking news and original journalism.

Joe Biden set the stage Wednesday for Barack Obama’s historic address as the Democratic nominee by launching a heated attack tying John McCain to the Bush White House.

On the eve of Hurricane Katrina’s third anniversary, a nervous New Orleans watched Wednesday as another storm threatened to test everything the city has rebuilt.

NYT: Senator John McCain has decided on his running mate, two Republican strategists in contact with Mr. McCain’s campaign said Wednesday.

More ominous signs have scientists saying that a global warming "tipping point" in the Arctic seems to be happening before their eyes.

First came the health problems. Then, unable to work, Ada Noda watched the bills pile up. And then, suffocating in debt, the 80-year-old did something she never thought she'd be forced to do.

A key civil nuclear agreement between Russia and the U.S. looks likely to be shelved until next year at the earliest amid mounting tensions over the fate of Georgia's breakaway republics.

Barack Obama became the first African-American ever nominated for president by a major political party after delegates to the Democratic National Convention chose him as their standard-bearer Wednesday.

A virus designed to swipe passwords from online gamers has inexplicably popped up in some laptop computers aboard the international space station.

Union bosses in this region of rural Mississippi have long grumbled that the largest factories here hire illegal immigrants, and that the immigrants were starting to get more overtime and supervisory positions.

Many veterans of the March on Washington will gather at televisions Thursday night and watch an event they would have considered impossible not just in 1963, but perhaps in 1983, or 1993.

Scientists in Israel are taking digital photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the 2,000-year-old documents available to the public and researchers on the Internet.

“I don’t want her to look like she’s going into a convent school, but it’s just a little too much for a 15-year-old,� the “Project Runway� mentor told OK! magazine about Cyrus’ style.

The brief respite for consumers at the gasoline pump may come to an abrupt end if Tropical Storm Gustav slams into the petroleum-rich Gulf Coast and its numerous refineries, just as Americans begin packing up cars for the Labor Day weekend.

Iraq is calling on companies to submit designs to build a giant Ferris wheel in Baghdad — the latest in a string of lavish proposals painting the capital as a leisure friendly city.

Hopeful signs for women: Forbes fifth annual ranking showcases women who have beat out men for top posts this year.

A blogger suspected of streaming songs from the unreleased Guns N’ Roses album “Chinese Democracy� on his Web site was arrested Wednesday and appeared in court, where his bail was set at $10,000.

To boost attendance and help people deal with high energy costs, churches are trying everything from holding gas card raffles to holding 99 cent gas sales at local stations.

Anna Goeldi was executed for being a witch more than 220 years ago — the last witch beheaded in Europe. On Wednesday, the Swiss decided the least they could do was clear her name.

Michael Phelps and hip-hop superstar Lil’ Wayne are set to appear on the season premiere of "Saturday Night Live" on Sept. 13.

A federal jury recommended the death sentence for convicted child killer Joseph Edward Duncan III on charges related to the kidnapping and murder of Dylan Groene.

Labor Day weekend translates to the last hurrah of summer, when sun-lovers prepare for a bittersweet farewell to the season. Enjoy summer's last gasps at one of these close-to-home locales.

FOX News Channel - We Report. You Decide.

New Orleans officials begin preliminary planning to evacuate and lock down the city in hopes of avoiding the catastrophe that followed the 2005 storm. Mayor Ray Nagin planned to leave the Democratic National Convention to return home for preparations.

Microsoft’s latest internet browser includes a piece of software that allows internet users to hide the audit trail of websites they have visited.

Bill Clinton declares Obama ready for White House, vows to do 'everything' he can to help elect him | PHOTOS | VIDEO

• McCain Expected to Appear With VP on Friday
•Former VP Hopefuls Address Dem Convention
• McCain Goes for Obama's Jugular in Latest Ad
• Dramatic Stage Set for Obama at Invesco Field

The Justice Department on Wednesday recommended a dramatic reduction in the prison sentence of imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who became the key witness against lawmakers and congressional aides he spent years corrupting.

State health officials are confirming a type of E. coli bacteria has been found in 10 patients who were sickened by a severe illness in northeastern Oklahoma.

Results taken from air samples reveal that a body was decomposing in the trunk of a car driven by the mother of missing Florida toddler Caylee Anthony, a local TV station reported.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani claimed Wednesday that the United States originally requested permission during troop withdrawal negotiations to leave armed forces there until 2015, Reuters reported.

The U.S., Europe and several of their allies are out to make the case that Russia's decision to recommend independence to two Georgian rebel provinces was "shortsighted," the White House said Wednesday.

Police continue to investigate the cause of death a 51-year-old Florida mother found Sunday in the Atlantic Ocean, though her family already suspects foul play

Svetlana Kuznetsova shook off an early break and rallied to a 7-6 (3), 6-1 victory over Sorana Cirstea on Wednesday in the second round of the U.S. Open.

A worker jumped to his death from an oil rig Wednesday after an explosion rocked a Tulsa-area oil field.

New data show New York City residents are contracting the virus that causes AIDS at three times the national rate.

Parents of cheerleaders at an Ohio high school are frustrated with school officials for uniforms they say come up short in the classroom.

Almost more than the convention of Barack Obama, the 2008 DNC is like a party given for and by Nancy Pelosi.

Ever wonder what happened to Tara Conner? It looks as though 2006’s troubled Miss USA has come a long way from her days of battling a drug/alcohol addiction to now teaching other young women how to act like ladies.

A tabby from the Qingyan province in China recently sprouted a pair of fur-covered wings on his back during a hot-weather spell, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported

Matthew McConaughey's father died having sex with his mom, Mama McConaughey says in her new book, "I Amaze Myself!"

"One Day at a Time" actress Mackenzie Phillips was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday on suspicion of possession of a controlled substance, Sgt. Jim Holcomb of the LAX airport police told FOXNews.com.

Sink or swim: Michael Phelps is trading the pool for the "Saturday Night Live" stage.

Biting the hand that feeds IT

Reunion bash planned

Some 400 staffers from that flag bearer of the 1980s UK home computing revolution, Acorn, are to gather next month to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the firm's foundation.…

BT insists orders will be delivered

Online retailer Dabs.com has told customers to hang fire for a few days while orders due to be delivered by Amtrak are reassigned to another courier.…

To Guam and beyond

It looks like Google is prepping another underwater comms cable.…

Rent due again?

Suing communication providers over alleged patent infringements has worked pretty well for Judah Klausner.…

The semantics of force feedback

Microsoft and the force-feedback technology firm, Immersion, appear to have come to final terms after six years of suing each other.…

It's easy. Those tubes are busted

More evidence that the intertubes are fundamentally broken has been served up by Wired.com in an article laying out a technique to surreptitiously hijack huge chunks of the internet and monitor or even modify unencrypted traffic before it reaches its intended destination.…

Chinese Democracy, American Extremism

The FBI has arrested a 27-year-old American blogger for leaking some unreleased Guns N' Roses tunes to the internet.…

SQL tools plug gaps

What was seen as a major hole in Google's MapReduce database technology has been plugged, not once but twice. In the same week.…

German spies Phenom X2

Quite contrary to rumors AMD scrapped its plans to bring dual-core K10 parts to the market, the chip maker may have already begun selling the line to its partners on the sly.…

A road map for regulators of the future

Getting a head start on the world's antitrust regulators, an astute Finn is offering a bastardized version of Google's search engine that ignores sites served up by Google itself.…

Parlez-vous GoogleTalk? Er, no

Android developers have admitted that Google's mobile phone platform won't support GoogleTalk in its first version, and that Bluetooth support will be severely limited.…

Peterborough Attacks

A small British company developing a unique form of hovering aircraft says it will soon demonstrate a new and much more serious version of its technology.…

More false positives ahoy?

Microsoft wants to rein in more Windows XP pirates over the coming weeks, by pushing out a new version of its “nagware� which detects when a machine is running a fake copy of the OS.…

Gore-Tex killer?

UK company Plasma Product Innovations (P2i) today demonstrated a chemical process it claims can render any material 100 per cent waterproof.…

130 redundancies at A Novo UK

A Novo UK, which services mobile phones, monitors and set-top boxes, is laying off at least 130 staff and closing its Manchester repair centre.…

Unnecessary for fraud clampdown

UK election scrutineers are pushing for polling stations to require tougher proof of identity to reduce the risk of ballot-rigging, but do not want voters to be forced to bring photo ID.…

Handset sales continue to soar

Global mobile phone sales will exceed 1.2bn handsets this year, although tough economic conditions are already biting into phone sales, market watcher Gartner has warned.…

But UK punters still protected

The Mobile Marketing Association has published its guidelines for advertising pushed over Bluetooth connections, and considers anyone who hasn't opted out to be fair game for spammers.…

Modest GPS-enabled mobile from Nokia

Review The upgraded successor to last year’s 6110 Navigator, the 6210 is a tidy slider-design handset, bearing more than a passing resemblance in looks and specs to the recently-launched 6220 Classic.…

'Off the record' browsing is go

Microsoft has outlined the new privacy tools available in its forthcoming browser Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).…

Rum, sodomy and the lash

Avast there and unfurl the Twat-O-Tron ye scurvy landlubbers of Middle England, lest Portsmouth Historic Dockyard make barrel boys of ye all, damn their eyes:…

Push two keys to bypass password

iPhones protected by a password aren't actually protected at all, as just by pressing a few keys a miscreant can access all the phone's functions without needing the password at all.…

Playing with the big boys now

Serco is to acquire SI International, an IT reseller specialising in the US federal market, for $423m cash - a 40 per cent premium on SI's closing price on NASDAQ yesterday. Serco is also asssuming net debt of $87.3m, so the enterprise value of the deal is $510m - a multiple of 12.3 on forecast EBITDA for 2008.…

Show us the money, says NASA

Presidential contender John McCain and two other bigshot Republican senators have written to George Bush urging that NASA keep the Space Shuttle fleet alive beyond 2010. The politicians are concerned about US reliance on Russia for manned space transport in the early years of the next decade.…

32GB unit offers speed boost

Samsung has begun punting a compact 32GB solid-state drive card at makers of Small, Cheap Computers.…

Local gov hates marketeers

Most local authority electoral officers support the information commissioner's recommendation to scrap the edited electoral roll, according to a new survey.…

Vostro revamped

Dell still hasn't formally announced its Eee PC rival but it did at least unveil some cheap Linux machines today based on Intel's Atom processor - the forecast revamp to its Vostro budget business box line-up.…

Jesusphone fails ASA test

The Advertising Standards Authority has told Apple UK not to show an advert which suggested the iPhone contained "all parts of the internet" any more.…

Problems solved?

The iPhone Dev Team has posted PwnageTool 2.0.3.1, a revised version of the iPhone hacking utility released yesterday then quickly removed.…

'A niche market'

An army of online deal seekers has called for a boycott of Boffer.co.uk, after the "daily deal" site fooled them into coveting a non-existent bovine sex device.…

Have you seen my identity?

The number of personal information leaks reported in the US this year have already exceeded the total amount in all of 2007, San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center said today.…

Stolen keys unlock back door

Attacks in the wild are under way against Linux systems with compromised SSH keys, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is warning.…

Worm infects International Space Station laptops

A computer worm that ferrets out passwords managed to stow away on laptops aboard the International Space Station, NASA has confirmed. It is not the first time a NASA computer has become infected.…

Calls for death of Mac EULA

Psystar, the company that sells open systems capable of running Mac OS X, plans to fight back against the copyright infringement lawsuit Apple has filed against it.…

Microsoft not the only fruit

Embarcadero Technologies has updated its recently acquired CodeGear Rapid Application Development (RAD) suite and languages for Windows.…

Modular Linux goodies return

Hardware hackers can soon start building their own Linux gadgets with a fresh batch of Lego-like building blocks from Bug Labs.…

'You want savings? Pay us an extra hundred'

US telco giant AT&T has announced two new international data plans for the Jesus Phone, saying they'll save Americans "hundreds of dollars" on journeys abroad. But we all know this is just another way for the company to hold your wallet hostage.…

Entry-level replaces Fibre Channel with SAS

Just 12 months after introducing the Celerra NS20, EMC has increased its capacity by 50 percent, and replaced its entry level role with a cheaper NX4 model.…

Music store returns - minus 'Songs for Tibet'

The People's Republic has pardoned iTunes after access to the online music store was apparently blocked in reaction to selling a new Tibet-themed album during the Olympic games.…

Stream ciphers easily split (maybe)

Senior cryptologist Adi Shamir is developing a new attack for rooting out potential weaknesses in encryption ciphers, dubbed the Cube Attack.…

A new low

With a sick email malware campaign, pond dwelling scumbags are claiming to have kidnapped the children of would-be targets of infection.…

Murders Murderdrome

Murderdrome is a comic published exclusively for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which makes its removal from iTunes something of a problem for publishers Infurious and bodes badly for their comic-rendering application.…

First they came for the mice; and I said nothing

Pentagon boffinry chiefs are on the verge of inking a deal which could see US forces equipped with "neuromorphic" imitation brain modules, each potentially as intelligent as a cat.…

Bad weather, Olympics, leaves on line credit crunch blamed

Ticket sales at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe were down ten per cent this year, in part because of the technical failure of its box office system.…

And theft of commercial secrets

A UK government minister has warned that cyber-terrorists were attempting to take out the national grid.…

Acquires facebooky wooky start-up?

Amazon.com is buying Shelfari – that is, according to the Seattle social networking start-up, but for now the online retail giant is keeping mum about the deal.…

Scientists issue incense fug health warning

Researchers have warned that burning joss-sticks and incense is associated with "an increase in some types of lung cancer, and cancers of the upper respiratory tract, such as throat and mouth cancer", the Guardian reports.…

Scientists probe barotrauma fatalities

A research team from the University of Calgary has found that a large percentage of bat fatalities at wind turbine sites are caused by a sudden drop in air pressure around the turbine blades, the BBC reports.…

Lands next month

Citrix Systems yesterday announced the imminent release of XenApp 5, in its latest attempt to strengthen its hold on the data centre and desktop virtualisation market.…

Rumours of death of paper greatly exaggerated

The humble paper-based book isn't burnt just yet. Amazon is keeping schtum as to how many e-books it has sold, but evidence is mounting that predictions of iPod-grade sales and billion-dollar revenues were a smidge optimistic.…

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Paolo writes "A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog. Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington, writes a blog and used it to complain about the service he was getting from Comcast. Shortly afterwards he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems and suggesting he might look at a guide it had posted on its web site. Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland used Twitter to complain about the company and was surprised to be contacted directly. Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers. The company was ranked at the bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have just sponsored a new bil