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Reed Elsevier Group PLC, the London and Amsterdam-based educational publisher and owner of the LexisNexis information service, reported Thursday its first-half profit fell 48 percent and said it would sell new shares to raise money to cope with debt from its acquisition of ChoicePoint Inc.

Adobe updated its Flash software today to patch several security issues, including a vulnerability being exploited by attackers. Among the vulnerabilities being patched are flaws in Microsoft's Active Template Library, which was used by Adobe during its development process. - Adobe issued a patch to cover several security holes in its Flash Player software today, including a memory corruption issue that has been targeted by hackers. All together, the update fixes 12 vulnerabilities. The most critical among them is the memory corruption bug, which is believed to have b...

. Chairman confirms Blair will give public evidence . Hague says inquiry goes against nation's wishesOpposition politicians expressed renewed doubts about the scope and approach of the Iraq inquiry today after its chairman Sir John Chilcot confirmed that he may not be able to report until 2011.At a news conference, Sir John, a former permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office and a former staff counsellor for the security and intelligence agencies, insisted the inquiry would be 'thorough, rigorous fair and frank'. He confirmed that Tony Blair would be giving evidence in public.He also said he would not shy away from apportioning blame and said that he wanted to hear evidence in public 'as much as possible'. He went on: 'If we find that mistakes were made, that there were issues which could have been dealt with better, we will say so frankly.'His comments showed that the inquiry will be unlike the non-judgmental, behind-closed-doors affair envisaged by Gordon Brown when he origi

Prosecutors must spell out policy for MS sufferer in assisted suicide caseBritian's highest court issued a historic judgment today that could finally remove the fear of prosecution from people who travel abroad to support relatives seeking an assisted suicide.In a unanimous ruling, the law lords ordered the director of public prosecutions to immediately draw up a policy that would spell out when prosecutions would and would not be pursued.The ruling was strongly in favour of Debbie Purdy, 46, who has multiple sclerosis and who has been fighting to protect her husband, Omar Puente, should he accompany her to a clinic in Switzerland that specialises in euthanasia. She had argued that the law was unclear and uncertainty surrounding the issue breached her human rights.Speaking outside the House of Lords after the judgment, Purdy, from Bradford, said she was 'ecstatic'.'I am eagerly awaiting the DPP's policy publication so that we can make an informed decision to make sure what we do does n

Yahoo/Microsoft: Yahoo has finally signed a deal with Microsoft. But dithering for a year and a half has hurt. Instead of selling itself for a chunky premium, the company has retreated from its core web search business, outsourcing it to the Redmond giant. This turns Yahoo into a company oddly reminiscent of internet also-ran AOL.

Japanese core consumer prices fell a record 1.7 percent in the year to June, with weakening consumer demand for goods playing an increasing part in pushing the country deeper into its second spell of deflation this decade

You guys really are desperate to avoid discussing the big economic issues, eh?

Major progress has been made in Air Indias attempts to cut costs, with the Committee of Secretaries (CoS) giving its board permission to rework wage agreements and the airlines dozen-odd unions adopting a more accommodating stance on the issue.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwire - July 30, 2009) - The following issue(s) will resume trading on the TSXV: /T/ Company EAGLE I CAPITAL CORPORATION TSXV Symbol EIC.P Resumption Time July 31, 2009 9:30AM EDT /T/

The University of Southampton, which has research centers for such subjects as oceanography, medicine and the Internet, is buying a massive IBM iDataPlex supercomputer that will hold more than 8,000 quad-core Intel Xeon processors and be capable of 74 teraflops, which would rank it in the 100 supercomputers in the world. IBM introduced the iDataPlex server array in 2008, aiming it at Web 2.0 data centers and HPC environments. - Researchers at a university in England will be able to use an IBM supercomputer that will rank among the top 100 fastest systems in the world. The University of Southampton and OCF, an integrator and IBM partner in England, announced an agreement July 30 in which OCF will build an IBM supercomputer...