Daily News Channel
Swiss diplomats are trying to meet with three American hikers being held in Iran, the Swiss Embassy in Tehran said Monday. The embassy would not say whether Iranian authorities had responded to their request or if diplomats had met the Americans
Author Kurt Andersen’s new book, Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America, examines the economic, political cultural opportunities to be found in the wake of the financial crises. In this excerpt, the first of five on TIME.com, he glances back through history to see how national destinies can change. It was fitting that as I was writing my previous book, an historical novel called Heyday published in 2007, I turned 50.
In less than three weeks, Afghan voters — still reeling from one of the most violent months since the war on terror started — head to the polls for what some call the country’s first-ever truly contested election. Two candidates, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, have emerged as the top contenders among the dozens hoping to unseat President Hamid Karzai, who has led the country since shortly after the 2001 fall of the Taliban and is seeking re-election.
The new Judd Apatow movie carried the perky title Funny People, but audiences quickly figured out it should really be called The Guy Who Thinks He’s Gonna Die and Isn’t Very Nice. Or Funny. It managed a decent $8.7 million on opening day, dropped 15% on Saturday and is expected to finish the weekend at $23.4 million
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi and reformist former President Mohammad Khatami on Sunday blasted the trials of people arrested in post-election demonstrations. Those on trial had been tortured into confessions, Moussavi said in a statement posted on his Ghalam News Web site. “They have been stepped on so severely that they would have confessed to anything else, had they been instructed to do so,” Moussavi said.
If Japanese engineers had their way, we might soon be cheering on a robotic World Series. Every year or two, Japanese researchers roll out a new robotic invention — the latest to grab headlines earlier this month was a mechanized baseball duo of a batter and pitcher that can throw 90% of its pitches in the strike zone
The British government will push for a computer hacker who broke into Pentagon and NASA computers to serve his jail time in the United Kingdom if a United States court sentences him to jail, a top politician said Sunday.
Three men who escaped from prison in Belgium in a daring helicopter escape committed a string of robberies on Saturday, a police spokesman said. The escapees, who include a man considered to be one of the country’s most dangerous criminals, robbed a bank, a gas station and two storage facilities, said the Bruges police spokesman Sunday.
Two days before leaving Tehran and three weeks after Iranian Intelligence had come around looking for me, I was taking no chances. The notes, essays and photos on the protests I had been regularly sending back for publication would have to be sent to the States separately…with my grandma. She had a flight to the U.S.
Iranian security forces arrested three Americans, accusing them of illegally entering the country from Iraq’s Kurdish region, Iran’s official Press TV said on Saturday. The network’s Web site quoted a wire story saying the three Americans were backpackers and that a Kurdish official had warned them not to hike in the mountains because of the proximity of the Iranian border. Officials say the case is under investigation, Press TV said