Daily News Channel
The State Department’s top Middle East official will meet next week with the Syrian ambassador to the United States as part of what senior administration officials call a resumption of diplomatic dialogue with Damascus after nearly four years. Jeffrey Feltman, the acting assistant secretary for the Near East, requested a meeting with Ambassador Imad Moustapha, according to State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid.
Tamil Tiger rebel aircraft on Friday dropped bombs in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, and a rural town, military sources told CNN. One or two bombs fell near the nation’s air force headquarters, with one striking the Inland Revenue Department building, the sources said
Iranian scientists have reached "nuclear weapons breakout capability," according to a new report based on findings of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.
Shark attacks on humans were at the lowest levels in half a decade last year, and a Florida researcher says hard economic times may be to blame. Sharks attacked 59 people in 2008, the lowest number of attacks since 57 in 2003, according to George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File, part of the Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. There were 71 attacks in 2007
The Sudanese government and a rebel faction in the country’s troubled Darfur region have agreed to embark on talks that many hope will eventually end a six-year conflict that has killed about 300,000 people, Qatari media reported Tuesday. The government and representatives of Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) will sign an initial agreement Tuesday on confidence-building measures, Qatar’s official news agency, SUNA, quoted the country’s prime minister as saying
North Korea has a long history of communicating with the United States through provocation and brinksmanship, and it has played to type ahead of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s four-nation trip to Asia that began Sunday. In recent weeks, Pyongyang has annulled its maritime border with South Korea, renounced the nonaggression agreement between the two countries, and moved missiles and equipment around in ways that could signal preparations for a launch, according to U.S. officials.
With $42.2 million, the biggest opening gross thus far in 2009, "Friday the 13th" easily won the record-breaking Presidents Day weekend box office race, beating out Valentine’s Day favorites "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and "He’s Just Not That Into You," as well as solid holdovers "Taken" and "Coraline." (All totals listed here are according to early three-day estimates from Media by Numbers; rough figures for the four-day holiday weekend will be out tomorrow.) That $42.2 million sum is the top first-weekend figure for any movie in the nearly 30-year-old “Friday the 13th” series — including the 2003 mashup, Freddy vs. Jason, which premiered with $36.4 million. In fact, the original “Friday the 13th” movie, from 1980, grossed just $39.7 million during its entire run, not adjusted for inflation.
The world’s richest countries committed to "any further action that may prove necessary" to restore confidence in the global financial system, their finance ministers said as they wrapped up a two-day meeting in Rome. The Group of Seven finance ministers also urged countries not to close their markets to goods and services from abroad. “An open system of global trade and investment is indispensable for global prosperity,” they said in a statement at the end of their meeting Saturday.
Finance ministers from the world’s leading industrialized nations were holding their second and last day of meetings in Rome on Saturday with an agenda squarely focused on the world financial crisis. Italy is hosting the meeting of the Group of Seven in its role as G7 president for 2009. G7 members are the United States, Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Britain, and Canada.
The commuter plane that crashed into a home near Buffalo, N.Y., was new and had a clean safety record, officials said Friday, leaving investigators few immediate clues about why it suddenly plunged just minutes before its planned landing, killing 50 people. The twin turboprop aircraft — Continental Connection Flight 3407 from Newark, N.J. — was coming in for a landing when it went crashed Thursday night about five miles short of the Buffalo Niagara International Airport