Japan steered off the agenda at a nuclear security summit on Tuesday to hit out at North Korea’s plans for a rocket launch next month, as U.S. President Barack Obama cautioned against complacency in dealing with the threat of nuclear terrorism. A communique issued at the end of the two-day meeting of more than 50 [...]
A woman from Iraq who was found beaten next to a threatening note saying “go back to your country” has died, and police are investigating the possibility of a hate crime. Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Shaima Alawadi was taken off life support Saturday [...]
Nathaniel Raymond is the first to admit that he has an unusual job description. “I count tanks from space for George Clooney,” said the tall, easygoing Massachusetts native as he sat in a conference room in front of a map of the Sudanese region of South Kordofan. Close by, pins and ink scrawlings on the [...]
Pope Benedict flying to Cuba for a historic visit, has said that Marxism was out of place in the contemporary world and urged Cubans to find “new models”. His remarks on Friday were at least as forthright as any made by his predecessor, John Paul II, on a groundbreaking trip to the country 14 [...]
The nation’s difficult history with race relations has been central to the narrative of Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency and has often complicated the ways in which he deals with the issue both as a candidate and as president. But the president’s decision Friday to assertively insert himself into the controversy surrounding the fatal [...]
Whitney Houston was a chronic cocaine user who had the drug in her system when she drowned in a hotel bathtub, coroner’s officials said Thursday after releasing autopsy findings that also noted heart disease contributed to her death. The disclosure ended weeks of speculation about what killed the Grammy-winning singer on Feb. 11 on the [...]
A US soldier accused of gunning down civilians in southern Afghanistan is to be charged with 17 counts of murder. Robert Bales, an army staff sergeant, also faces six counts of attempted murder and six counts of aggravated assault, an official told AP on condition of anonymity. Bales, 38, is suspected of leaving a US [...]
The Walt Disney Co. said Monday that it expects to book a loss of $200 million on the movie in the quarter through March. That’s among Hollywood’s biggest money-losers ever. Directed by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, the 3-D effects-laden movie about a Civil War veteran transplanted to Mars was already headed to the “Red Ink Planet,” [...]
The US is set to file a case against China at the World Trade Organization challenging its restrictions on rare earth exports. The European Union and Japan are expected to support the US in its case. Beijing has set quotas for rare earth exports, many of which are critical to the manufacture of high-tech products. [...]
A former member of an elite Guatemalan military force extradited from the United States last July was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison Monday for his role in the killings of 201 people in a 1982 massacre. Pedro Pimentel Rios was the fifth former special forces soldier sentenced to 6,060 years or more for what [...]