Looks like the current economic climate has reached out and touched the Newspeak project:

First, the good news. We will be releasing a Newspeak prototype in the first week of January 2009. This prototype is anything but finished, but it will have to do, because of the bad news (insert dramatic pause here).

What's the bad news? Well, funding for the Newspeak team is being discontinued in early January, another victim of the times.

I wish them luck - it's an interesting project. You can see Gilad's Smalltalk Solutions presentation on Newspeak here.