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â—†Nikkei extends losses to 4 days, closes at new 17-month low TOKYO, Jan. 7 KYODO Japan's key Nikkei stock index closed at a fresh 17-month low Monday, extending its losing streak to four straight trading days, on worries the U.S. economy may be heading for a recession. The 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average, which tumbled by more than 600 points, or 4 percent, on Friday, the first trading day of the year, lost an additional 190.86 points, or 1.30 percent, to 14,500.55, for its lowest finish since July 2006. The broader Topix index of all First Section issues on the Tokyo...

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth. The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days. The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment. The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature. The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period...

Stocks extend slide on Countrywide news By JOE BEL BRUNO, AP Business Writer 20 minutes ago Stocks fell sharply Thursday after a move by Countrywide Financial Corp. confirmed fears of widening problems with some mortgages and tighter access to credit. A sell-off overseas offered Wall Street little reason to try to stanch the bleeding a day after the Dow Jones industrial average closed below the 13,000 mark for the first time since April and the Standard & Poor's 500 index moved into negative territory for the year. Investors' confidence took a drubbing Wednesday on concerns about potential trouble at Countrywide,...

Dating a massive undersea slide Sid Perkins From San Francisco, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union Pieces of moss buried in debris deposits along the Norwegian coast have enabled geologists to better peg the date of an ancient tsunami and the immense underwater landslide that triggered it. Carbon dating of the newly unearthed moss suggests that the landslide occurred about 8,100 years ago. Sometime after the end of the last ice age, the largest landslide known to geologists took place off the coast of Norway. Called the Storegga slide, this slump of seafloor sediments included about 3,000 cubic...

Dangers in a Dollar on the Edge By Robert J. Samuelson Friday, December 8, 2006; Page A39 Let's face it. Foreign exchange markets are not mass entertainment. They're not the NFL, MTV or MySpace. So you might have missed the latest excitement of the sliding dollar. Who cares if the euro is now worth $1.33 instead of the $1.28 it was worth on Nov. 20 -- a 4 percent loss for the dollar? Well, we all should. The dollar's mysterious movements pose one of the thorniest economic questions of our time: Can the world economy thrive without the massive stimulus...

Recent Landslides In La Conchita, California Belong To Much Larger Prehistoric Slide The deadly landslide that killed 10 people and destroyed approximately 30 homes in La Conchita, California last January is but a tiny part of a much larger slide, called the Rincon Mountain slide, discovered by Larry D. Gurrola, geologist and graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The slide started many thousands of years ago and will continue generating slides in the future, reported Gurrola at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America today in Salt Lake City. Mudslides at La Conchita. (Image courtesy...

TRENTON, N.J. - Ashtrays have been disappearing in cars like fins on Cadillacs, and so could smoking while driving in New Jersey, under a measure introduced in the Legislature. Although the measure faces long odds, it still has smokers incensed and arguing it’s a Big Brother intrusion that threatens to take away one of the few places they can enjoy their habit. “The day a politician wants to tell me I can’t smoke in my car, that’s the day he takes over my lease payments,” said John Cito, a financial planner from Hackensack with a taste for $20 cigars.

Tommy Thompson Gets Chip Implant Implanted microchips are getting a plug from a heavy hitter - former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. Thompson plans to promote a product made by his new company � a medical info chip � by having one implanted in his arm. "It doesn't cause any pain," Thompson told Paul Bedard, who writes the Washington Whispers column in U.S. News & World Report. The chip is made by Florida-based VeriChip, which recently added Thompson to its board of directors. The rice-size chip contains a 16-digit identification code that can be scanned at hospitals and...

WINDER - A Ten Commandments display in the Barrow County Courthouse, which was the subject of a nearly two-year legal battle, has been quietly removed, in compliance with a federal court order. And Barrow County residents likely will be left with a $150,000 legal bill, the price it cost after one anonymous resident sued his government over the Judeo-Christian icon hanging in the breezeway of the county courthouse in downtown Winder. U.S. District Court Judge William O'Kelley entered an order Tuesday ordering that the Ten Commandments display be removed, according to court records. As a part of that order, Barrow...

NEW YORK - Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said on Thursday in an interview on CNBC he maintains a long-term bearish view on the dollar due to the size of the U.S. trade deficit, despite the currency's recent strength. . . . The latest available data show that the U.S. current account deficit widened to $195 billion in the first quarter of this year, or 6.4 percent of gross domestic product — a record by both measures. This means the U.S. economy must attract around $2 billion of foreign capital every day just to balance its books, alleviate the downward pressure...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's call for a special election and a new advertising campaign to promote his agenda have failed to arrest his slide in popularity, according to a new statewide poll. According to the Field Poll released Tuesday, 37 percent of registered California voters approve of Schwarzenegger's job performance, a drop of 18 percentage points since February. Continuing a trend that began in January, 53 percent of registered California voters said they do not approve of Schwarzenegger's performance. That's a jump of 18 percentage points since February, a month after the governor declared his intention to call...

Bush team hits back as poll ratings slide By Alec Russell in Washington (Filed: 30/09/2003) With his ratings falling, President George W Bush's re-election team fired off a retaliatory blast at his Democratic challengers yesterday, depicting them as "unusually weak and divided". In a series of interviews with the New York Times, Mr Bush's advisers made clear that they felt the time had come to remind America that there was more to politics than opinion polls. Senior advisers said he was on target to raise $170 million (£100 million) by the end of the winter, a colossal "war chest" that...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 April 10 Unusual Rocks in Death Valley Credit & Copyright: Joe Orman Explanation: How did those big rocks end up on that strange terrain? One of the more unusual places here on Earth occurs inside Death Valley, California, USA. There a dried lakebed named Racetrack Playa exists that is almost perfectly flat, with the odd exception of some very large stones, one of which is pictured above....