Kerry in Egypt to press for political consensus

CAIRO: US Secretary of State John Kerry was in Cairo on Saturday to push for a way out of Egypt's violence-wracked political impasse, underlining the need for a consensus to overcome a crippling economic crisis.As Kerry arrived from Turkey, protesters torched a police station in the canal city of Port Said which is entering its third week of civil disobedience, reflecting the size of the...

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Online note service Evernote latest firm to get hacked

Yet another company has fallen victim to a hack, with attackers breaking into systems at Evernote, maker of a Web-based note-taking application used by about 50 million people.The company said in a security notice that some user data had been accessed and that Evernote was requiring all users to reset their passwords. Apparently, though, no sensitive financial info was stolen, and no user content...

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Sequester blame game goes on as shutdown looms

President Obama on Saturday called for a "caucus of common sense" to step forward and stop the sequester, which began cutting $85 billion of federal spending out of the economy on Friday. Play VideoSequester to affect all federal agencies "I know there are Republicans in Congress who would rather see tax loopholes closed than let these cuts go through," he said in his weekly address. "And I know...

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Rescuers Search for Man as Fla. Sinkhole Grows

Rescuers early Saturday morning returned to the site where a sinkhole swallowed a Florida man in his bedroom after the home's foundation collapsed.Jeff Bush was in his bedroom when a sinkhole opened up and trapped him underneath his home at 11 p.m. Thursday night.While the sinkhole was initially estimated to be 15 feet deep on Thursday night, the chasm has continued to grow. Officials...

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Obama blames Republicans for "dumb" cuts

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama on Friday blamed Republican refusal to compromise on deficit cutting for "dumb" and "unnecessary" spending cuts about to slam into the fragile US economy.The arbitrary and automatic $85 billion dollar cuts, known as the "sequester" will begin later Friday, in a self-inflicted wound brought about by deep ideological polarization between the president and...

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What's up with the sun? Plenty.

High-resolution image of a sunspot taken at the Sacramento Peak Observatory of the National Solar Observatory in New Mexico. We're currently in the midst of what scientists say is the sun's 11-year solar weather cycle and it's making for quite the show. Over the last few months, NASA and the European Space Agency have been recording solar flares as they erupt, tracking solar storms that send charged...

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Man feared dead in 100-foot sinkhole near Tampa

Last Updated 1:15 p.m. ET SEFFNER, Fla. A man was missing and feared dead early Friday after a large sinkhole opened under the bedroom of a house near Tampa. His brother says the man screamed for help before he disappeared. The 36-year-old man's brother, Jeremy Bush, told rescue crews he heard a loud crash around 11 p.m. Thursday, then heard his brother screaming for help. "When he got there,...

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Obama, Congress Fail to Avert Sequester Cuts

President Obama and congressional leaders today failed to reach a breakthrough to avert a sweeping package of automatic spending cuts, setting into motion $85 billion of across-the-board belt-tightening that neither had wanted to see.Obama met for just over an hour at the White House today with Republican leaders House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell...

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WikiLeaks: Manning says he wanted "public debate" on war

WASHINGTON: US Army private Bradley Manning told a military tribunal on Thursday that he leaked incident logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks in order to start a "public debate.""For me they represent the underground realities of the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan," Manning told the court, after his lawyer said he plans to plead guilty to some of the charges leveled...

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Google testing new navigation design borrowed from Chrome

Google tests a new navigation system for its services that dumps the controversial black bar.(Credit:Google Operating System)Google is testing a new version of its home page that eliminates the controversial navigation bar that has sat atop its services for two years, the company said.The version now being tested requires users to click a grid icon borrowed from Chrome OS for links to Gmail, Google...

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Vatican hints at start date for papal conclave

VATICAN CITY Much speculation surrounds the date when leaders of the Roman Catholic Church will begin the process of selecting their new pope. Play VideoPope Benedict XVI: "I am no longer Pope"The date for the conclave of cardinals to begin their deliberations has not yet been set, although one of Pope Benedict XVI's final acts before resigning his office was to amend the rules governing the election...

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Benedict Departs Vatican for the Last Time as Pope

Pope Benedict XVI bade his final farewell to the faithful today, lifting off from the Vatican in a white helicopter as the first pope to resign in six centuries.Just before 5 p.m. local time, Benedict, 85, walked out of the Vatican for the last time as pope, waving to a cheering crowd in the Courtyard of San Damaso as he entered a black Mercedes for the short drive to a nearby...

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Iran upbeat on nuclear talks, West still wary

ALMATY (Reuters) - Iran was upbeat on Wednesday after talks with world powers about its nuclear work ended with an agreement to meet again, but Western officials said it had yet to take concrete steps to ease their fears of a secret weapons program. The United States, China, France, Russia, Britain and Germany offered to ease sanctions slightly in return for Iran curbing its most sensitive...

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US Supreme Court takes up voting rights law

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court Wednesday took up the US voting rights law, a cornerstone of efforts to guard against a resurgence of racial discrimination in American states with a segregationist past.At issue is the 1965 law's Section 5, which requires nine mainly southern states and local governments in seven other states to obtain Justice Department approval for any changes in their...

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Tim McGraw samples new system to sell album in a status update

Tim McGraw turns to Facebook to sell his latest album.(Credit:Screenshot/Jennifer Van Grove) Country singer Tim McGraw wants you to buy his album -- on Facebook. Tuesday, the recording artist became one of the first people to try out a new system for selling through status updates on the social network. McGraw's team used e-commerce platform Chirpify to encourage Facebook fans to type "buy" in the...

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Anti-virus firm makes new revelation on Stuxnet

Updated at 11:22 a.m. ET LONDON The sophisticated cyberweapon which targeted an Iranian nuclear plant is older than previously believed, an anti-virus firm said Tuesday, peeling back another layer of mystery on a series of attacks attributed to U.S. and Israeli intelligence. The Stuxnet worm, aimed at the centrifuges in Iran's Natanz plant, transformed the cybersecurity field because it was the...

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Bring on the Cuts: Some Want the Sequester

Mark Lucas wouldn't mind seeing America's defense budget cut by billions."There's quite a bit of waste within the military," Lucas, who serves as Iowa state director for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), told ABC News. "Being in there for 10 years, I've seen quite a bit of it."With the budget sequester set to kick in on Friday, the former Army ranger is among...

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Egypt opposition to skip polls over transparency fears

CAIRO: Egypt's main opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front, said Tuesday it will boycott upcoming parliamentary elections due to a lack of guarantees of a transparent process."The decision of the Front, unanimously, is to boycott the elections," NSF member Sameh Ashour told a news conference in Cairo after a meeting of the alliance grouping mainly liberals and leftists.Ashour...

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Ubuntu Touch OS heading to slew of smartphones, tablets

The Ubuntu Touch home screen on a tablet.(Credit:Ubuntu/Canonical)The Ubuntu Touch operating system is being ported to more than 20 types of smartphones and tablets.The developer preview of the Linux-based OS was released for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones and Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets last week.And developers are working to port the OS to a far greater range of devices, including the...

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GOP Rep.: Cheney probably will go to hell for Iraq war

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., the congressman who went from coining the term "freedom fries" to becoming an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, said that there's probably a spot in hell for former Vice President Dick Cheney because of his responsibility for the conflict. "Congress will not hold anyone to blame," Jones said Saturday at an event hosted by the libertarian group Young Americans for Liberty....

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Boehner Pressures Dems to Get 'Off Their...'

Feb 26, 2013 12:48pm House Speaker John Boehner used some choice words to pressure Senate Democrats to avert the looming sequester — $85 billion of arbitrary across-the-board cuts — insisting that “the House has done its job” and the burden to offer an alternative before the cuts strike Friday is on the president’s party.“We have moved the bill in the House twice,”...

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Italy election forecasts point to political gridlock

ROME (Reuters) - Conflicting early forecasts of the result of Italy's election on Monday raised the specter of deadlock in parliament that could paralyze a new government and re-ignite the euro zone crisis. Officials from both centre and left warned that such gridlock could make Italy ungovernable and force new elections. Opinion polls have long pointed to the center-left...

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Tennis: Federer survives scare against popular Jaziri

DUBAI: Roger Federer seemed to have talked his way into a scare before beginning an up-and-down defence of his Dubai Open title with a recovery against an opponent even more popular than himself on Monday.The Grand Slam record-holder had said before the match that often took him a while to suss out players he had never previously played - and sure enough he ran into trouble against the...

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'Brave' nets Pixar its seventh Best Animated Feature Oscar

Pixar's 'Brave' won the studio's seventh Oscar for Best Animated Feature Sunday night.(Credit:Disney/Pixar)Although it didn't earn the critical acclaim of "Toy Story 3," "Up," or "Ratatouille," Pixar's 2012 film "Brave" joined those three hits, as well as three other Pixar predecessors, in winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.Beating out fellow nominees "Wreck-it Ralph," "Frankenweenie," "ParaNorman,"...

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Addressing controversy, Menendez invokes words of MLK

Amid a handful of allegations that threaten to mar his reputation in the Senate, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., continues to maintain his innocence, decrying the accusations as right-wing attempts to "destroy" his career and invoking the words of Martin Luther King Jr. in asserting his faith that justice will win out. Menendez, who was re-elected to his seat in November, has since been hit with allegations...

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Secret Vatican Dossier for 'Pope's Eyes Only'

Feb 25, 2013 9:05am ROME – Pope Benedict XVI decided to keep secret the contents of an investigative report on the “Vatileaks” scandal, ruling that the only person who will get to see it will be the next pope.The top secret dossier details the findings of an internal investigation the pope launch last April into the so-called Vatileaks affair, in which Benedict’s...

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Gloomy Italians vote in election crucial for euro zone

ROME (Reuters) - Italy voted on Sunday in one of the most unpredictable elections in years, with many voters expressing rage against a discredited elite and doubt that a government will emerge strong enough to combat a severe economic crisis. "I am pessimistic. Nothing will change," said Luciana Li Mandri, 37, as she cast a ballot in the Sicilian capital Palermo on the first of two days...

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