Margaret Thatcher in hospital after operation

 Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the country's first woman elective leader, is in hospital recovering from surgery to remove a growth on her bladder, a source close to the family said on Friday.After experiencing pain in her bladder earlier in the week, he 87-year-old went to hospital where she underwent a minimally invasive operation, Tim Bell, a public relations executive who...

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British retailers start online sales early

 British retailers have brought forward their Christmas clearance sales online in the hope that shoppers will log on to buy bargains and offset lackluster spending in stores.Marks & Spencer launched its sale online at midday on Monday, it said on its website, while department store John Lewis said it would cut online prices when its stores close at 1700 GMT. Debenhams has already started...

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China may require real name registration for internet access

BEIJING (Reuters) - China may require internet users to register with their real names when signing up to network providers, state media said on Tuesday, extending a policy already in force with microblogs in a bid to curb what officials call rumors and vulgarity.A law being discussed this week would mean people would have to present their government-issued identity cards when signing contracts for...

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Tajikistan blocks scores of websites as election looms

 Tajikistan blocked access to more than 100 websites on Tuesday, in what a government source said was a dress rehearsal for a crackdown on online dissent before next year's election when President Imomali Rakhmon will again run for office.Rakhmon, a 60-year-old former head of a Soviet cotton farm, has ruled the impoverished Central Asian nation of 7.5 million for 20 years. He has overseen constitutional...

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Netflix suffers Christmas Eve outage, points to Amazon

An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.'s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows...

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Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage

 An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc's streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows...

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Census: US population growth rising slowly

After two centuries of boom and bust, America's population growth may finally be leveling off.In all, the U.S. population is now increasing a bit faster, thanks to an improving economy, but not enough to lift growth above its lowest level since the Great Depression.The nation is getting older and is less likely than before to be married, with women waiting longer to have children, if at all. Immigration...

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Woman sentenced to 1 year for export violations

A judge has sentenced a woman to one year in prison for conspiring to ship material to Pakistan for a nuclear reactor.U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on Thursday also ordered Xun Wang to pay a $100,000 fine and perform 500 hours of community service.Wang, a former managing director of PPG Paints Trading Co. of Shanghai, admitted helping send three shipments of high-performance epoxy coatings...

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Assange addresses supporters at Ecuadorean Embassy

 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange emerged for a rare public address Thursday, praising jailed U.S. soldier Bradley Manning in an address delivered from the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.Addressing supporters on a cold and wet English evening, the 41-year-old Australian looked fit and healthy despite half a year spent in trapped inside the small apartment he shares with Ecuador's...

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Judge allows evidence against man in GPS case

A federal judge is allowing prosecutors to use evidence in a drug conspiracy conviction that had been overturned because police used a global positioning system without a warrant.U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in Washington said in a ruling Thursday that Antoine Jones had not established that police would not have discovered the house in Fort Washington, Md., allegedly used to stash money...

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