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Hopes fade as rescue teams say there is now no chance of finding any Air France survivorsThe bodies of two men believed to have been on board the Air France jet that disappeared last Monday were hauled from the Atlantic Ocean yesterday by members of a Brazilian search team.Rescue teams from Brazil and France have been scouring a remote area of the Atlantic since the Air France flight carrying 228 people disappeared as it travelled between Rio de Janeiro and Paris.It was the worst air disaster since 2001. Five Britons, 58 Brazilians and 61 French citizens were on board the Airbus, which disappeared off radar screens in the early hours of Monday morning. Jorge Amaral, a colonel from the Brazilian air force, said that the bodies were spotted around 400 miles from the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha at between 5am and 6am local time yesterday.'We can confirm that debris and bodies from the Air France plane were recovered from the water,' he told reporters at the air force base

As a personal finance columnist, I tell readers to shop around when buying insurance. With my homeowners, windstorm, automobile and umbrella liability insurance policies all coming up for renewal at the same time, I tested the wisdom of that advice.

Fresh assault on prime minister expected after European election resultsGordon Brown's supporters today warned would-be rebels that the Labour party was in no mood for a leadership challenge, as they sought to rally around the beleaguered prime minister.Brown, who was in Normandy for the 65th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings, reiterated his determination to carry on with the job, despite a fracturing of his authority and backbench calls for him to go.'In these unprecedented times you are bound to have ups and downs in politics,' he told reporters in France. 'But you have got to stick with the policies and make sure that they come through.'But a new poll of Labour activists brought further bad news for the prime minister, revealing that fewer than half of all party supporters want him to lead them into the next general election, with one in five urging him to quit now.The poll of 800 party members carried out by YouGov for Channel 4 News found that one in three thought L

Parents rush to burning building where 100 children were being supervisedAt least 31 children were killed and dozens injured after flames engulfed a nursery in northern Mexico, officials said today.The fire may have started at a tyre and car warehouse on Friday afternoon and spread to the nearby ABC nursery in the city of Hermosillo, said José Larrinaga, a spokesman for Sonora state investigators. But he said the cause of the fire and its origins were still under investigation.The fire was brought under control within two hours and most children died of asphyxiation, he said.Guadalupe Ayala, a coordinator of Red Cross rescue workers, said around 100 children were in the nursery when the fire started. Their ages ranged from six months to five years.'Firefighters had to knock holes in the walls to get the children,' she said.The Sonora governor, Eduardo Bours, said five nursery employees and 26 children were taken to hospital, according to the government news agency, Notimex.The Hermosil

Will there be another 300-game winner after the Big Unit? Not unless Nolan Ryan is able to convince baseball to throw away the pitch counters and restore the days when starters stayed around long enough to get their own decisions.

There's no way around it, Tiki Barber's stock has plummeted. He's the TV equivalent of General Motors, but there ain't no bailout coming his way. Maybe Barber can turn things around, but it's fourth-and-long and time is running out.

wandazulu writes 'Forty years ago this summer, Ken Thompson sat down and wrote a small operating system that would eventually be called Unix. An article at ComputerWorld describes the history, present, and future of what could arguably be called the most important operating system of them all. 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service). They had no desire to stick with any of the batch operating systems that predominated at the time, nor did they want to reinvent Multics, which they saw as grotesque and unwieldy. After batting around some ideas for a new system, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix, which the pair would continue to develop over the next several years with the help of colleagues Doug McIlroy, Joe Ossanna and Rudd Canaday.'' of this story at Slashdot.

Will there be another 300-game winner after the Big Unit? Not unless Nolan Ryan is able to convince baseball to throw away the pitch counters and restore the days when starters stayed around long enough to get their own decisions.

David Carradine's death may have been accidental and not suicide, Thai police said yesterday. Carradine's nude body was found Thursday in the closet of his Bangkok hotel room. A rope around his neck was attached to a closet bar; another was tied to his genitals.

Villanova University astronomer Edward Guinan has had some adventures over the years, from scrounging for black-market cement to make Iran's first high-powered telescope to discovering the rings around Neptune at an observatory in New Zealand.