UNITED STATES

NEW YORK, Aug 4 - Since spinning off from Man Group plc in 2007, MF Global has had a tough time of it. But after reporting its first profitable quarter in a year and pricing a difficult bond offering, the broker-dealer looks on its way to better days, thanks in part to one key appointment last year.

Gartner predicts global mobile platforms will rise 11% but revenue nearly 23% in 2011

President Barack Obama took steps to strengthen America's policing of war crimes on Thursday, issuing a proclamation that bars some human rights violators from entering the country, and that also sets up a board to try and anticipate imminent mass atrocities.

A five-year campaign 'Operation Shady RAT' that compromised networks in 72 major organizations around the world, including several governments, ASEAN, IOC and the world anti-doping agency, made news Tuesday. Government agencies in India, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S. were attacked, plus high-profile targets like the International Olympic Committee.

The Virginia Tech campus was under lockdown, Thursday morning, after an alert posted on the official campus website warned that a gunman had been sighted in campus, bringing back memories of the 2007 shooting that left 33 dead.

Authorities initiated lockdown on the Virginia Tech campus Thursday after three youths reported a man carrying a gun covered with a cloth. Virginia Tech suffered a mass school shooting in 2007. Thirty-two students were killed and 25 were wounded.

AT&T Inc said some New York customers had voice service outages on Thursday morning because of a software problem that occurred during "routine maintenance activities."

Emboldened by concessions wrung from their own leadership and President Barack Obama during the debt limit fight, Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers will likely remain a driving force in the Republican Party -- and possibly induce gridlock until the 2012 elections.

Former British Open champion Louis Oosthuizen is looking for a spark to reignite his game at this week's WGC-Bridgestone Invitational after escaping injury in a traffic accident while preparing for the tournament.

The Dow is plunging, as stocks are coming back to the woes that Main Street has grappled with since the recession. Stocks had soared this year while Main Street America grappled with slow growth and high unemployment.

The Justice Department on Thursday cleared VeriFone Systems Inc's purchase of Hypercom Corp , after the companies found another buyer for its the point-of-sale terminals business, a private equity-backed group.

The U.S. sell-off follows even greater declines in Europe.

Toronto's main stock index slumped more than 3 percent on Thursday, as rising concerns about global growth more than wiped out the previous session's late-day rally and knocked world markets lower.

Charles Barkley has hard comments about Woods.

U.S. states are making "unprecedented" cuts to unemployment benefit programs, hoping to keep their budgets in line as the country's jobless rate shows no sign of budging, according to a report the National Employment Law Project released on Wednesday.

The U.S. debt deal means that federal spending will now generate even less demand in the quarters ahead, in an economy that?s already weak, and with an unemployment rate at 9.2 percent. To say the Fed has been monitoring the situation would be an understatement.

After a spectacular MVP season in 1968, Morall performed poorly in the Super Bowl ? among other things, he threw three interceptions.

Johannes Caspar, data protection supervisor in Hamburg, Germany, has asked Facebook to stop running its facial recognition feature on German users and to delete their biometric data, reported UK paper Guardian.

Scientists have identified an emerging "superbug" strain of salmonella that is highly resistant to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, often used for severe salmonella infections, and say they fear it may spread around the world.

The number of Americans newly infected with HIV remained stable between 2006 and 2009, but infections rose nearly 50 percent among young black gay and bisexual men, U.S. experts said on Wednesday.

Exchange operator NYSE Euronext on Thursday was hit by another glitch as it said the publication of all indexes based on European share markets was momentarily suspended.