Weather Death Toll Up to 6 as Storm Churns North

A killer Christmas storm is churning its way north leaving hundreds of thousands without power and snarling travel plans for people trying to get home after the holiday.Six people have died, mostly in weather related car crashes, as the South was hammered by as many as 34 tornadoes and a lethal coating of sleet and snow that spread from the South into the Midwest.Over 280,000...

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Syria envoy seeks peace as clashes rage

BEIRUT (Reuters) - International envoy Lakhdar Brahimi pursued mediation efforts in Damascus on Tuesday, but there was no pause in the bloodletting as Syrian Christians marked a bleak Christmas Day with prayers for peace. "We are here in a cave that symbolizes Syria right now," said a priest standing beside a nativity scene in a grotto. "It is cold here but the door is open...

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Officials confirm 64% of Egypt voters backed new charter

CAIRO: Egypt's electoral commission confirmed on Tuesday that a controversial, Islamist-backed constitution was passed by 64 per cent of voters, rejecting opposition allegations of polling fraud.Those official results tallied with figures given by President Mohamed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood immediately after the last round of polling at the weekend in the two-stage referendum.The National...

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Netflix outage mars Christmas Eve

Netflix's video streaming service suffered a Christmas Eve outage on "many but not all devices" across the Americas, according to the company.The outage continued into Christmas morning for some customers. The company tweeted on its Netflix US account at 8:45 a.m. PT that the service was "back to normal streaming levels."Netflix first started responding to tweets about disrupted service before 1 p.m....

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Christmas weather a worry across much of nation

Updated 11:30 a.m. EST NEW ORLEANS Forecasts of blinding snow, sleet and freezing rain threatened to complicate Christmas Day travel around the nation's midsection Tuesday as several Gulf Coast states braced for a chance of twisters, high winds and powerful thunderstorms. A blizzard watch was posted for parts of Indiana and western Kentucky for storms expected to unfold Tuesday amid predictions...

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Gunman Killed Firemen With Bushmaster, Left Note

A convicted killer, who shot dead two firefighters with a Bushmaster assault rifle after leading them into an ambush when they responded to a house fire he set in Western New York, left behind a typewritten note saying he wanted to "do what I like doing best, killing people," police said.William Spengler, 62, set his home and a car on fire early Monday morning with the intention...

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Afghan policewoman kills coalition contractor in Kabul: NATO

KABUL (Reuters) - An Afghan woman wearing a police uniform shot dead on Monday a civilian contractor working for Western forces in the police chief's compound in Kabul, NATO said. The incident is likely to raise troubling questions about the direction of an unpopular war. It appeared to be the first time that a woman member of Afghanistan's security forces carried out such...

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Afghan policewoman fatally shoots foreign adviser

KABUL: A female Afghan police officer shot dead a NATO civilian adviser inside Kabul police headquarters on Monday, officials said, in the first "insider" attack by a woman.It was the latest in a series of such attacks that have seriously undermined trust between NATO forces and their Afghan allies in the fight against hardline Islamist Taliban insurgents.A spokesman for NATO's International...

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Why startups shouldn't be afraid of Facebook cloning them

It'll take more than a Poke to knock out Snapchat.(Credit:Screenshot by Ben Parr/CNET)How long does it take a multibillion-dollar technology juggernaut to clone a popular social networking app? The answer: less than two weeks.I am, of course, talking about Poke, Facebook's clone of Snapchat, the app whose messages self-destruct after 1 to 10 seconds. As many people like to point out, it's perfect...

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Police in India clamp down on protests over gang rape

Even as Indian Prime Minster Manmohan Singh appealed for calm after violent weekend protests over the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi, police in the nation's capital were enforcing a complete clampdown. Prime Minister Singh urged calm and vowed to protect women as police struggled Monday to quell increasing outrage over sex crimes, following the gang-rape of a student on a bus...

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