Britain is in recession for the first time since 1991 after its economy shrank during the final two quarters of last year as a global financial crisis raged, official data showed on Friday.

The generally-used technical definition of a recession is two quarters running of negative economic growth.

In trade following the data, London's FTSE 100 index of leading shares was down 1.40 percent, Frankfurt's DAX 30 showed a loss of 2.15 percent and in Paris the CAC 40 had shed 2.01 percent.

"The FTSE continued to struggle after GDP figures proved we are now in a technical recession. This is no secret and had been predicted for some time," said City Index market strategist Joshua Raymond.

"What was important is that GDP figures showed a bigger contraction than anticipated and this was enough to bring in the sellers on mass pushing the FTSE index through the 4,000 (points) level."

The Office for National Statistics said that gross domestic product (GDP) had shrunk by 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared with the previous three-month period, when it contracted by 0.6 percent.

In Asian trade on Friday, Japanese share prices tumbled 3.81 percent, hit by overnight losses on Wall Street and Sony's forecast of a record loss, dealers said.

Sydney meanwhile shed 4.1 percent following weak US leads and news the nation's three main export economies were softening. Hong Kong closed down 0.6 percent, Seoul gave up 2.1 percent and Shanghai slid 0.71 percent.

"The short-term outlook for (Australian) shares remains highly uncertain," said Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital Investors.

"The difficult global economic and profit outlook mean that falls to new lows are a high risk."

The US House of Representatives will next week vote on an 825-billion-dollar bill, which supporters say may save the battered US economy from sliding into depression.

New US President Barack Obama has decided top advisors will give him a daily economic crisis briefing as he attempts to shore up the ailing US economy.

US stocks had tumbled Thursday on investor concerns over increasing unemployment and the housing market slump as well as company earnings' pessimism, traders said.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1.28 percent, the tech-heavy Nasdaq slumped 2.76 percent and the broad-market Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped 1.52 percent.

US markets were gripped by renewed caution after jobless claims jumped and housing starts and building permits plunged, "reinforcing the view that the economy remains mired in a steep recession," said analysts at Charles Schwab & Company.

The Labor Department had Thursday said the number of new US unemployment claims shot up to 589,000 in the past week, matching the highest level in more than 26 years.

Shams, whose name in Arabic means "sun," is among tens of thousands of Iraqis whose suffering will linger long after the war ends.

Shams' young life changed on Nov. 23, 2006, when a car bomb exploded near her father's pickup as he was driving his family — his wife, two sons and the daughter — home after a visit to his wife's parents in the Shiite district of Sadr City.

The blast engulfed their car in flames. Shams and her mother, who was fatally injured in the blast, were thrown from the backseat into street. Her father, Husham Fadhil, tried to douse the flames on his wife's clothing.

But there was little he could do for his 1-year-old daughter, lying face down next to her dying mother.

"I was totally preoccupied with putting out the flames which were burning my wife's body," Fadhil, 32, said. "Then, I lifted Shams and saw her face covered with blood. I thought that they were caused by minor injuries that would heal. Later, I learned that the blood was coming from her badly injured eyes."

The car bomb was one of a series of attacks in Sadr City, including rocket and mortar fire. Iraq's medical and rescue services were strained to cope with the carnage that day, when about 160 people were killed.

Ambulance attendants loaded the dead and wounded into vehicles and sped off to hospitals. Fadhil's wife Wafa, Shams and the two boys — 3-year-old Taif and 5-year-old Gaith — were rushed to separate hospitals. It took Fadhil hours to track them down.

"After searching for 24 hours, I found her in the Medical City compound," he said. "The doctors there took care of her burns but neglected her eye injuries" that left her blind.

In 2007, Fadhil took his daughter to Amman, Jordan, with the assistance of Doctors Without Borders. But the Jordanian doctors told him there was little they could do because Shams didn't get proper treatment at the time she was wounded.

"Had there been proper treatment of her eyes at that time, she could have at least had one of her eyes safe and active by now."

Months later, Fadhil took her to Iran, hoping for a miracle cure.

"We're going to L.A., we need one more win. We're not there yet," Ramirez said. "They're the best team in the National League and anything could happen."

But unless the Cubs can show some semblance of the team that won 97 games this season, they're headed to another disappointing finish. Each infielder made an error during the game and the Dodgers scored four unearned runs in the second inning to jump ahead 5-0.

"It wasn't good baseball. In fact, the last two days, that's probably been the two worst games we've played all year," frustrated manager Lou Piniella said. "It wasn't fun to watch, I'll tell you that."

Chicago became the 23rd major league team to lose the first two games at home in a best-of-five playoff series, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Only one has come back to win — the 2001 New York Yankees against Oakland.

Of course, that Yankees team was managed by Joe Torre, now in the Dodgers' dugout.

"When you give extra outs, chances are they're going to be capitalized on, and that's what we were able to do," Torre said.

The series switches to Dodger Stadium for Game 3 on Saturday night. Rich Harden will face Hiroki Kuroda, who pitched a four-hit shutout against the Cubs in Los Angeles on June 6.

"We're going to come out and try to jump on them again at home. That would be nice," Billingsley said.

Just a few days ago, Cubs fans were excited about the team's chances of winning its first World Series title since 1908. But suddenly, Chicago is on the brink of elimination. The Cubs must win two consecutive games in Los Angeles to get the series back to Wrigley.

Billingsley shut down Chicago's slumping lineup and Ramirez's 26th postseason home run landed on the roof of the batter's eye club in center, at least 450 feet away. It was his second jaw-dropping shot in two nights.

Japan's Nikkei 225 index, meanwhile, lost 1.83 percent to 12,834.18 as investors cashed in recent gains and Friday's drop on Wall Street darkened the near-term outlook.

Taiwan's benchmark plunged 3.3 percent, hurt by concerns about the country's electronics industry in the face of slowing world economic growth. Other stock measures in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore also retreated.

In Europe, stocks fell more modestly. Britain's FTSE 100 closed down 0.60 percent at 5,602.80, Germany's DAX fell 0.01 percent to 6,421.80 and France's CAC slipped 0.23 percent to 4,472.13. The markets often take cues from Wall Street, but U.S. exchanges were closed for Labor Day.

Global investors were uneasy after the U.S. on Friday released figures showing decreasing personal incomes and weak consumer spending — suggesting softer demand for foreign goods in the world's largest economy.

Oil prices also topped concerns as Hurricane Gustav churned along the Gulf Coast, where oil companies had shut down drilling and refining operations. However, signs that Gustav was weakening eased some of investors' uneasiness as the day wore on. While crude had risen $2.79 to $118.25 in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile exchange early in the day, it later retreated dramatically to trade at $111.12 a barrel, down $4.34 from Friday's settlement.

Although oil has fallen substantially since hitting a record of $147.27 in July, it remains very expensive and a drag on economies.

"There's not much positive news. We have slowing down in the U.S and higher oil prices. So investors are clearly still worried," said Alex Tang, head of research at Core Pacific-Yamaichi in Hong Kong.

Across Asia, companies that depend on the U.S. and other export markets took a beating, with cautious comments from computer maker Dell Inc. weighing on the technology sector.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the giant Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that supplies Apple and other leading brands, plunged 6.9 percent after posting a decline in profits.

A security official in the Bouira area told The Associated Press that nearly all the victims were civilians. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't allowed to discuss such matters with the media.

It was not immediately clear whether the bombings, which occurred at about 6 a.m. local time, were suicide attacks or if the two cars blew up by remote control. There was no immediate official comment on the attacks.

The military barracks were most damaged. "Parts of the walls have fallen-off, the fence is destroyed, cars are buried under the rubble," Abdellah Debbache, the Bouira correspondent of Algeria's Liberte newspaper, told AP by telephone.

Algerian news reports said the front facade of the barracks had been torn off and that several other buildings had been damaged.

Most victims from the second bomb had been traveling in a bus that passed in front of the hotel, APS said. Local hospital officials said they were workers from a construction company building a dam nearby at Koudiet-Acerdoun, the news agency reported.

Witnesses said several people had been brought to the hospital. Bouira was cordoned off by police and several additional roadblocks were set up in the surrounding region, they said.

The blasts appeared to be quite powerful, and an AP reporter in the area heard them from several miles away.

Bouira is located some 60 miles southeast of Algiers in the Bouira province.

Some 45 kilometers 27 miles to the north of Bouira in the adjacent Boumerdes province, a suicide bomber on Tuesday rammed a car into a line of applicants at a police academy in the town of Les Issers, killing at least 43 people and injuring 45.

No group has claimed responsibility for either attack. An al-Qaida affiliate has organized a series of bombings over the past two years in this North African country that has important oil and natural gas fields.

Violence has dramatically increased since 2006, when the GSPC, Algeria's last big extremist group left over from a quieted insurgency in the 1990s renamed itself Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa and joined Osama bin Laden's network.

The insurgency broke out in 1992 when the army canceled the second round of legislative elections that an Islamist party was expected to win. Ensuing fighting between security forces and Islamic militants left some 200,000 dead.

"Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," Jobs said.

Switch Not Used

Jobs' statement reveals Apple hasn't used the kill switch yet, but the company did remove an application from the App Store last week.

Apple removed the $999 "I Am Rich" application, which had the sole purpose of showing people the owner has money. The program creates a red icon that sits on the iPhone deck with a the words "I Am Rich" underneath. After the user activates the application, it glows on the handset like a ruby.

Apple initially approved the application, which bumps up against the pricing limit for applications sold on its App Store. The company was not immediately available for comment on why it decided to pull the plug.

Disappearing Acts

But the real controversy started when Jonathan Zdziarski, author of the books iPhone Open Application Development and iPhone Forensics Manual, discovered a URL buried in Apple's firmware. That URL links to a file dubbed "unauthorizedApps" where malicious or simply bad apps might go once they disappear from the App Store.

According to Zdziarski, I Am Rich isn't the only app to disappear. BoxOffice (renamed to Now Playing) and NullRiver's NetShare were also removed. But removing the applications from the App Store and removing them from a consumer's iPhone are two different issues.

"The kill switch is a very controlling gesture. I am not sure why Apple didn't disclose it up front as simply a security measure," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. "Consumers will accept an awful lot if you let them know what they are accepting."

"Everybody should have the same choice Cindy and I and Sen. Obama did," McCain told the National Urban League, an influential black organization that Obama will address on Saturday.

McCain listed a variety of changes in education policies that he contended would improve a flawed system — from school choice to more local control and direct public support to parents for tutoring. In each case, he said Obama came up short.

"My opponent talks a great deal about hope and change, and education is as good a test as any of his seriousness," he said. "If Sen. Obama continues to defer to the teachers unions instead of committing to real reform, then he should start looking for new slogans."

McCain's criticism of Obama, the first serious black candidate for president, to the National Urban League echoed the Republican theme that the Democrat's words don't necessarily match his actions or his thin resume.

"If there's one thing he always delivers it's a great speech," McCain said. "But I hope you'll listen carefully, because his ideas are not always as impressive as his rhetoric."

During a feisty question-and-answer sesssion, McCain drew gasps and grumbles from the mostly black crowd when he praised former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The one-time GOP presidential candidate was widely scorned by many civil rights leaders for permitting the city's police department to use overly aggressive tactics against black criminal suspects.

Giuliani, McCain told the group, transformed New York from "a city really none of us were comfortable walking in the streets to one that was basically safe."

In two high-profile cases during the Giuliani administration, police shot and killed unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo and beat and sodomized Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a Brooklyn station house.

McCain repeated his claim that "the best equal opportunity employer in the country is the U.S. military." However, an Associated Press study found that while blacks make up about 17 percent of the total force, just 9 percent of officers are black.

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