UNITED STATES

Gold and silver prices rose Wednesday, but a falling stock market pulled down shares of silver mining companies and left gold mining company stocks mixed in midday trading.

The battle for the world's most valuable company has heated up between Apple and Exxon Mobile, as Apple took over the crown during Wednesday trading.

Late last Friday night, special forces troops from the NATO-led coalition launched an operation to capture a Taliban leader in an inaccessible valley southwest of Kabul.

While Motorola was basking in the buzz that has been created around its upcoming Android device, the Droid Bionic, Samsung has thrown down the gauntlet in the 4G race, with rumors of a 4G LTE Samsung Galaxy look-alike Android phone called, the Celox, doing rounds in Korea.

A new solar flare Tuesday is the biggest in several years and is part of a pattern of solar storms scheduled to last until 2020, experts say.

The portable game system will come in red in September.

Wall Street stocks fell sharply on Wednesday on fears over possible trouble in the French banking sector that has large exposure to shaky peripheral European debt.

The U.S. Federal Reserve on Tuesday took the unprecedented step of promising to keep interest rates near zero for at least two more years and said it would consider further steps to help growth, sparking a rebound in stocks.

Boy or Girl? A controversial new blood test, not yet available in the U.S. could determine a fetus' sex as early as seven weeks for soon-to-be parents.

The mysterious orange goo that washed up on the Alaskan village of Kivalina has been identified as microscopic eggs, but the origin of the eggs remains unknown.

Apple's delayed launch of the highly-anticipated iPhone 5 is a marketing strategy that reeks of brilliance.

The U.S. faces nemesis Mexico in Philadelphia

David Cameron is pushing England's police force to use new methods of fighting back against rioting and looting across the country.

Prosecutors asked a federal judge to sentence Raj Rajaratnam to as much as 24-1/2 years in prison, calling the Galleon Group hedge fund founder arguably the most egregious violator of insider trading laws ever to be caught.

Applications for U.S. home mortgages rose last week as interest rates fell to their lowest level this year, an industry group said on Wednesday.

Toshiba Corp, the world's No.2 maker of flash memory, on Wednesday warned that profits in its chip business could fall short of expectations, citing weak PC sales, faltering U.S. and European economies and a higher yen.

Research in Motion has had a rough year and it hasn't gotten any easier with its phones' involvement in the London riots.

Oil led a rebound among commodities on Wednesday as investors went bargain hunting for riskier assets after the U.S. Federal Reserve promised to extend near-zero interest rates for two more years.

So much for the vaunted Federal Reserve consensus.

Stock index futures pointed to a lower open on Wall Street on Wednesday following the previous session's rally, with futures for the S&P 500 down 1.0 percent, Dow Jones futures down 0.9 percent and Nasdaq 100 futures down 0.9 percent at 4:33 a.m. EDT.

Standard & Poor's, whose unprecedented downgrade of U.S. debt triggered a worldwide stocks sell-off, is pushing back against a U.S. government proposal that would require credit raters to disclose significant errors in how they calculate their ratings.