MIAMI (Reuters) - The first hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic storm season began to weaken on Tuesday in the open Atlantic as it headed in the direction of Bermuda, U.S. forecasters said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq will not accept any security agreement with the United States unless it includes dates for the withdrawal of foreign forces, the government's national security adviser said on Tuesday.

According to a new report, over the past 12 months more than four-fifths of social networking site users said that they had received unwanted friend requests, messages, or posts on their social or professional network profile. While friend requests on their own seem innocuous enough, they are often just the first step towards whatever the spammers' intended malicious activity is, be it redirects to phishing or malware sites or even just unsolicit
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The morning after the exciting Wimbledon finale, Lance Armstrong, Kate Hudson, Luke, Isabelle, Grace and Ryder were off to tennis camp in LA. We've seen this loving couple hit the courts to show off their skills and, of course, affection but this time it was the kids' turn to play. While most of you thought it was too soon for Kate and Lance to be meeting each other's kids, from the looks of it Lance's twin girls are warming up to dad's newest gi
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Heidi Klum took a page out of Victoria Beckham's style guide, slipping into some baggy men's jeans for an afternoon of errands in NYC. Seal may be overseas at the moment, but Heidi still keeps her husband close to her at all times (plus a little bit of Leni with her blue hairclip). Casual Heidi is almost as familiar as seeing her all red carpet ready, but between that garment bag and Intermix loot, it looks like she has something more glamorous i
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Is a second phase of Rush Limbaugh's highly-successful "Operation Chaos" in the works?According to the conservative talk show host, such is possible, and if it ends up coming to pass, will have deliciously been set in motion as a result of a conspiracy theory espoused Monday by the Obama-loving actor Donald Sutherland.For those that missed it, Kiefer's dad published a blog at the Huffington Post yesterday suggesting there's a Clinton cabal to "de
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Filed under: Hacks, Nintendo WiiAs big of a kick as we get out of mods and hacks that make our favorite games more fun or accessible, we have to admit that we have a special place in our hearts for mods like the ones we're talking about today, mods that stand on the precipice of madness, laugh into the face of the torrential downpour of skepticism and dare man or God to find some purpose for their very existence.Why would you want to play Mike Ty
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Filed under: Culture, FeaturesEach week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: I've temporarily relocated to Seoul for the summer to work for a consumer electronics firm, so I thought I'd spend a little time detailing some of the differences in gaming culture here in South Korea, and the impact that infrastructure has on the gaming business. In short, there are two notable differences in
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As of 4 a.m. CDT today, the center of the storm was about 675 miles east-northeast of the northern Leeward Islands and about 1,035 miles southeast of Bermuda.

Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, a former EPA officials maintains.

A Life Flight helicopter has picked up a bicyclist struck by a vehicle on West Road near Pleasanton in north Harris County this morning, the Sheriff's Office reported.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also predicted Israel would collapse without Iranian action.

Relatives who had not heard from Charlene Blanscet since Saturday checked on her Monday and found her body in a lake near her home.

Shardcore sez, "I think I've just painted the geekiest picture ever. It's a portrait of my friend Richard, he's a sysadmin. I've painted him in a server room, with Marvin the Paranoid Android. Holding a ZX Spectrum. I think you'll agree it ticks all the boxes of English geeks of a certain age..." Link (Thanks, Shardcore!)...

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John's dug up this magnificent zombie lawn-sculpture by Alan Dickenson, available for a mere $90 -- think of the savings you'll realize by no longer having to pay someone to keep the kids off your lawn! Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets...

The Inbox Victory page collects photos of people pointing at their empty email inboxes, grinning madly before the next flood of emails pours in. I try very hard to be an inbox zero guy, but in practice I always end up with a couple hangovers in there -- usually related to scheduling meetings or calls with people, which is probably the most logistically difficult thing to do in my life. Have you ever been in the situation where you spend days tryi
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This brass and leather Soviet gas-mask is the genuine article, not a steampunk fetish-fashion prop (though, of course, it could be both). Link (via Wired Gadget Lab)...

Michael Erard's Wired story on the ways that Chinglish is mutating into a full-fludged (and widespread) dialect poses some interesting possibilities for the language's future, in which tonal suffices, borrowed vocabulary words, and streamlined grammar open up rich new expressive possibilities. I've always loved English's baking-soda-like capacity to absorb other languages' best features -- the Yiddish terminal "already" at sentences' end, the fan
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