Move over, “Avatar,” there’s a new force in town. In just 20 days in theaters, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has unseated the James Cameron pic as the No. 1 North American movie of all time. According to Disney, J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars” earned enough on Wednesday to pass “Avatar’s” $760.5 million lifetime gross. As […]
North Korea said it conducted a powerful hydrogen bomb test Wednesday, a defiant and surprising move that, if confirmed, would be a huge jump in Pyongyang’s quest to improve its still-limited nuclear arsenal. South Korea’s spy agency and outside nuclear experts cast strong doubt, however, saying the estimated explosive yield from North Korea’s fourth nuclear […]
Beijingers spent nearly half of 2015 breathing air that did not meet national standards, Chinese media reported Tuesday, as the city struggles to address a smog problem that has provoked widespread public anger. The Chinese capital faced 179 polluted days last year, with 46 of them considered heavily polluted, according to the Global Times, citing […]
Behind a chain-link fence and under heavy security, workers on Monday returned to their offices at the San Bernardino campus where 14 people died last month in a massacre. Inland Regional Center employees flashed their identification badges to security guards who ushered them into a parking lot surrounded by a mesh-wrapped fence as dozens of […]
Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly propelled to global notoriety when its cartoonists were shot dead by jihadist gunmen a year ago on Thursday, fears it has been abandoned in its struggle to “laugh at everything”, one of the survivors of the attack said. In the wake of the killing of eight of its staff, […]
Saudi Arabia executed 47 people on Saturday, including a prominent Shiite cleric behind anti-government protests and Sunnis convicted of involvement in deadly al-Qaida attacks, the government said. The 56-year-old cleric, Nimr al-Nimr, was a driving force of the protests that broke out in 2011 in the Sunni-ruled kingdom’s east, where the Shiite minority complains of […]
Operator, won’t you help me replace this call? A 9-foot-tall, narrow structure installed this past week on a Manhattan sidewalk is signaling a plan to turn payphones into what’s billed as the world’s biggest and fastest municipal Wi-Fi network. The first of at least 7,500 planned hot spots are due to go online early next […]
China will be the epicentre of growth for the virtual reality industry, which is likely to ‘explode’ in magnitude and orders in the next one-two years From the title of this article, you may think I’m a recent fanboy of the new virtual reality (VR) craze, where users wear goggles on their head to escape […]
FACEBOOK CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $US120 million to the San Francisco Bay Area’s public school system. The couple’s gift will be spread over the next five years and is the biggest allocation to date of the $US1.1 billion in Facebook stock the couple pledged last year to the nonprofit […]
Iraqi forces backed by U.S.-led airstrikes drove Islamic State militants out of the center of Ramadi on Monday and seized the main government complex there, according to military officials, who said insurgents are still dug into pockets of the city west of Baghdad. Ramadi, the provincial capital of the sprawling Anbar province, fell to IS […]