Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of Russia’s largest oil company and once its richest man, has been found guilty of embezzlement. His supporters say his real crime was daring to oppose the country’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin.
All the preparations for this year are in place! Come back each day to receive updates from the North Pole and to discover new surprises in the Kids' Countdown Village.
People lined up on the veranda of the American mission hospital here from miles around to barter for doctor visits and medicines, clutching scrawny chickens, squirming goats and buckets of maize. But mostly, they arrived with sacks of peanuts on thei
The health ministry has listed 2535 deaths since the outbreak in the impoverished Caribbean nation erupted in mid-October. Almost 57,000 of the 114,497 people infected have been treated in hospital.
Hopes rose last week that the death rate could b
Chavez's congressional allies are considering extending the "Social Responsibility Law" for broadcast media to the Internet, banning messages that "disrespect public authorities," "incite or promote hatred" or crimes, or create "anxiety" in the popul
Venezuela's parliament gave President Hugo Chavez decree powers for 18 months outraging opposition parties that accused him of turning South America's biggest oil producer into a dictatorship. The move consolidated the firebrand socialist leader's ho
'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically di
Simon Black recently posted six places in the world that are full of opportunity and freedom; in a couple significant ways, they coincide with mine. His picks were Chile, Singapore, Columbia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Estonia.
Do You Hate the State? - The Brewing Cyber Wars - Neocon Warmongering vs. WikiLeaks Truth - Lies Are the Health of the State - Did BP, Transocean, and Halliburton Know the Deepwater Horizon Well Would Blow? -
A former extradition specialist for the Crown Prosecution Service today predicted it would be "very difficult" for Sweden to get the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, sent back to face sexual assault allegations.
Raj Joshi, a former head of the
How Wikileaks is copying 16th-century Amsterdam ... There is nothing particularly novel about what Wikileaks is actually doing – it is actually rather primitive journalism – though none the less brilliant for it....
[these are US territories] Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. "It's getting worse," says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation's clim
Scotland Yard has deployed undercover officers to spy on a network of activists whose viral campaign against tax avoiders threatens to close down hundreds of shops in the run-up to Christmas. The surveillance officers were first used at a protest in
South Korea on Friday threatened to bomb North Korea if it tries a repeat of last week's attack, raising its rhetoric after the United States warned of an "immediate threat" from Pyongyang.
Kim Kwan-jin, a retired general, was speaking at a parlia
At a recent conference on economic cooperation in Germany, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin explained it was “quite possible” that in the future Russia would join the eurozone.
Pablo Picasso almost never stopped creating, leaving thousands of drawings, paintings and sculptures that lure crowds to museums and mansions worldwide. Now, a retired electrician says that he has 271 of them.
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates sat down with French Minister of Defense Herve Morin Feb. 8 in Paris, he had a harsh assessment of the Russian government and some severe differences with his French counterpart on several issues of international s
A freak computer glitch at Australia's biggest bank froze cash machines and left millions of people struggling to access their money. A corrupted file wiped out a huge number of transactions, including salary payments and transfers, and crashed some
"There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law. I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first." The document issued by the notary public declares Duran to be the "owner of the Sun, a star
Iceland's getting a new constitution — and it's really going to be the voice of the people. The sparsely-populated volcanic island is holding an unusual election Saturday to select ordinary citizens to cobble together a new charter, an exercise in di
Three teenage boys have been found alive after being lost in their boat in the Pacific Ocean for 50 days.
The boys, from the Tokelau Islands, a New Zealand-administered territory in the South Pacific, had been given up for dead after an unsuccessf
North Korea warned Friday that U.S.-South Korean plans for military maneuvers put the peninsula on the brink of war, and appeared to launch its own artillery drills within sight of an island it showered with a deadly barrage this week.
The fresh a
China warned on Friday against military acts near its coastline ahead of U.S.-South Korean naval exercises that North Korea, days after shelling a South Korean island, said risked pushing the region toward war.
Beijing's warning came as the Seoul
Opting out of Google Maps’ Street View in Germany will blur image of your building on the photographic map, and make you hideously uncool. So says a group of vandals who egged homes in Essen that appear pixelated on the search engine’s map
Skirmishes between the Korean militaries are not uncommon, but North Korea's heavy bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island was the first on a civilian area, raising fears of an escalation that could lead to a new war on the Korean peninsula. South Korean tr
The world's fastest-growing population is also its most rapidly urbanizing one. According to a U.N. report, within 4 decades, Africa's cities will triple in size, with 60 percent of the continent's people living in urban rather than rural areas.