We're having a bad day, and believe me, we are as frustrated as you are. Trying to post News etc is painfully slow. The problem has been brought to the attention of our internet ops team who are looking into it. Apologies.
Update from the tech team:
Database server is out of the red for now, we have made some configuration changes to the way in which certain areas of the site access the database.
The improvement will be gradual, so the slowness won't disappear but in theory should improve over time over the course of the afternoon. Ops are still working on other improvements as well as the team to try and improve this even more.