"Everything is closed. We couldn't sell our stock or take money from the bank," said Johann Sigurdsson as he left a branch of Landsbanki in downtown Reykjavik. Iceland is negotiating a $5.4 billion loan from Russia to shore up the nation's finances.

The Fed, ECB, Bank of England, Bank of Canada and Sweden's Riksbank each cut their benchmark rates by half a percentage point. Switzerland also took part. Separately, China's central bank lowered its key one-year lending rate by 0.27 percentage point.

Brazil and Argentina have launched a new payment system in their bilateral trade, doing away with the US dollar as a medium of exchange.

The space race was "war by another means." The Cold War rivals were engaging in a technological rivalry and wanted to prove to non-aligned nations and the rest of the world that they were "second to none."

Americans' retirement plans have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months, Congress' top budget analyst estimated Tuesday.

The government should not be building predictive data-mining programs systems that attempt to figure out who among millions is a terrorist, a privacy and terrorism commission funded by Homeland Security reported Tuesday.

A month of primary recounts in the election battleground of Palm Beach County, Florida, have twice flipped the winner in a local judicial race and revealed grave problems in the county's election infrastructure, including thousands of misplaced ballots.

Lehman Bros will beat the competition by offering friendly personal service, and may even get a guy who sits in the parking lot and sells pretzels.

The news of the decision comes according to Palin campaign sources, who spoke on the condition no one in the media directly ask Palin anything.