Blaming pilots 'makes no sense'

Could the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have been the result of human intervention? Les Abend says the odds are against it.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gAHE2c

Pinger hunter needs direction

A device that can hear the pings of airplane flight recorders is being sent to the Indian Ocean but it will need help or luck if it is to find Flight 370's 'black boxes.'



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fgN41j

Talks over possible Israeli spy release

The United States and Israel are discussing the possible release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard as part of efforts to save fragile Middle East peace negotiations, according to sources familiar with the talks.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hu3Afd

Family of newlyweds 'still waiting'

It's been more than three weeks since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1giA4UT

MSF: 'Unprecedented' Ebola outbreak

An outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in west Africa has spread to Guinea's capital and beyond its borders in an "an unprecedented epidemic," a leading aid agency reported Monday.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1ojRnPi

U.S. landslide death toll rises

The grim death toll from the massive landslide in rural Washington rose Monday to 24 people, authorities said.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1giA9rC

Iranian hostage figure seeks UN post

Iran has named a member of the radical student group that seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held Americans hostage for more than a year to be its next ambassador to the United Nations.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gVOjF5

Spring brings fresh Korean tension

Journalist Andrew Salmon explains why tensions between North and South Korea increase each year at this time.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jQ0jKm

'Dynasty' star Kate O'Mara dies at 74

Kate O'Mara, the British actress best known for playing Joan Collins' sister Caress on the 1980s show "Dynasty," has died. She was 74.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1dKqVKb

How MH370 pinger search works

Indra Petersons explains technology used by searchers to locate the plane's flight recorder.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1feGQyT

Footballer turns lifesaver in Ukraine

Football rivalry was put aside in Ukraine on Sunday as one player acted quickly to save the life of one of his opponents.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1iS5nua

Syria frees 2 kidnapped journalists

Two Spanish journalists held more than six months in Syria are on their way home, Spain's El Mundo newspaper reported Sunday.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fBd6Jh

Abbott: Efforts ramping up

CNN's Atika Shubert talks with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott about the search for Flight 370.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jPOi7J

Ex-Israel PM Olmert guilty of bribery

An Israeli judge on Monday convicted former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of taking bribes from a developer while mayor of Jerusalem.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fG7bTt

Jailed Al Jazeera reporters denied bail

An Egyptian court on Monday again denied bail to three Al Jazeera journalists who are jailed on terrorism-related charges in a case that has drawn international condemnation from human rights groups.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/P9S2TZ

Neighbors unite for landslide victims

Elaine Young looks up as a helicopter hovers above a mountain of splintered trees and ice-cold, gelatinous mud, the remnants of a massive landslide that wiped out her once idyllic neighborhood.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fG7cqe

Ebola death toll hits 70 in Guinea

At least 70 people are reported to have died from Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Guinea, according to a statement from the West African nation's health ministry.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fAnjWz

Can Cuba lure foreign investors?

Few would say Cuba is an easy place to do business, but a new law aimed at bringing pep to an anemic economy may lure more foreign investors.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1ocsTYi

Kerry to Israel for Mideast peace talks

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is traveling to Israel on Monday as part of the latest efforts to forge a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fFIarp

Golf: Bowditch books Masters berth

Eight years after he attempted to take his own life, Steven Bowditch is heading to the Masters.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/P9v67m

Army dolphins to switch nationalities

Just when you thought this divorce couldn't get any messier.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gF7y5M

Zakaria: Putin lives in fantasy world

Fareed examines modern border changes around the world. Do Russia's actions in Ukraine belong in the 19th century?



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1pxTtbM

U.N.: Japan must halt whale hunt

The International Court of Justice ruled Monday that Japan can no longer continue its annual whale hunt, rejecting the country's argument that it was for scientific purposes.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1pxTr3B

Russia's Medvedev visits Crimea

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev traveled to Crimea on Monday, the highest-level visit from Moscow since it annexed the Black Sea peninsula earlier this month.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hqDvgZ

Treason charge for Musharraf

A Special Court in Pakistan has charged former military ruler Pervez Musharraf with high treason -- a crime that carries the death penalty or life imprisonment.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1mnHxHz

Gadhafi's son apologizes to Libya

Libyan state television has aired a video of Moammar Gadhafi's son Saadi in which he apologized to the nation from prison.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1iLC8cA

Race to find Flight 370's data recorder

An Australian navy ship fitted with a black box detector will join the search for the missing Malaysian plane Monday in a desperate race against time.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jpXbCk

Ukrainians 'buy guns, pack their bags'

Alexander Motyl says Ukrainians are buying guns and packing bags as their nation beefs up its military and sends troops and tanks to its borders with Russia.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1o7PtBw

Report: North and South Korea exchange fire

North Korea launches live-fire exercises near its maritime border, leading to an exchange of fire with South Korea.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jO2nCF

Drills set off artillery fire

North Korea's drill off its west coast sets off an exchange of fire across a disputed maritime border.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1mnnby8

Kerry: Russia won't move troops

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday after four hours of talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that Russia had reaffirmed its commitment to finding a diplomatic solution in Ukraine but had not agreed to move Russian troops from the Ukraine border.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fCz3Yx

More quakes rattle L.A. area

A 5.1-magnitude earthquake hit the Los Angeles area Friday night, the USGS reported.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1g9beqD

Malaysia pledges not to give up

Malaysia is under-equipped to search for missing Flight 370, but other nations are helping. CNN's Jim Clancy reports.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jNQPzs

Disappearance similar to 1977 tragedy

The disappearance of Flight 370 triggers memories of a deadly hijacking in 1977 of another Malaysia Airlines flight, in which all 100 people on board died.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1o3Iidi

Firefight outside Kabul compound

Two explosions erupted outside of Afghanistan's election commission compound in Kabul Saturday, a commission employee told CNN. Following the blasts, militants took up combat positions outside the compound and engaged in a fire fight with Afghan security forces, said Mohammad Dawran.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1dD7qTU

Landslide search is 'like Katrina'

Washington landslide rescuers are comparing the search efforts to that of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hIeom5

Wake up to reality of climate change

Bill Richardson says a new international study highlights how climate change is real, how the planet's warming is a threat to the economy and environment



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/P8aRqz

Why Saudis unfriended the U.S.

The world's most powerful democracy and the world's most absolute monarchy have long been close, if unlikely, allies.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hr1ARb

Ebola spreads to Guinea capital

Health officials are scrambling to contain an outbreak of Ebola that has spread to Conakry, Guinea.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1pr65kW

30 still missing after U.S. landslide

The number of missing after a massive landslide in Washington drops to 30. CNN's Dan Simon reports.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fEbmyU

Families: We're like hostages

At first they were glad for the security presence at their hotels. Now, some MH370 families say Malaysian authorities are restricting their movements.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fCz0Mq

Blaming pilots 'makes no sense'

Could the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have been the result of human intervention? Les Abend says the odds are against it.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gAHE2c

El-Sisi declares candidacy

Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has declared his candidacy in the national elections expected later this year in Egypt.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fwgEMQ

Bloomberg editor quits over China

A senior Bloomberg News journalist quit his role earlier this month, saying the "mishandling" by his bosses of a story critical of China was behind his departure, amid suggestions that the New York-based company is pushing a financial strategy for China that overshadows editorial autonomy.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1k2nJbp

Does Obama really understand Putin?

Andrew Kuchins says since Putin has met no real push back for Crimea, why would he stop there?



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fw093B

NCAA's Final Four are...

Kentucky beat Michigan 75-72 Sunday to earn a spot in the Final Four of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1pvolcN

Time to 'hold Russia accountable'

Sen. Robert Menendez says Russia's moves into Ukraine now require a swift and biting response from the U.S. and the West.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jSI3Ma

Why capitalism needs an upgrade

Mitch Kapor and Ben Jealous worry that a lack of diversity in tech firms is stalling innovation in Silicon Valley. Capitalism, they say, remains our nation's operating system but the current version needs an upgrade



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fufIsg

Why it's bad for FB to gobble Oculus

Paul Saffo says it's harmful for Silicon Valley innovation ecology when tech giants acquire start-ups.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/O0CiRZ

First gay couples marry in UK

Andrew Wale is a writer and actor. His partner, Neil Allard, is a guesthouse owner. Together, they helped make history.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1iI5qbP

Football: Liverpool smash Spurs, go top

Liverpool moved to the top of the English Premier League with a 4-0 win over Tottenham Hotspur at Anfield on Sunday.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1ofYjwW

Tennis: Superb Djokovic wins Miami final

Novak Djokovic has claimed a fourth Miami Masters title after an emphatic straight sets win over his old rival Rafael Nadal at Crandon Park.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1ofYjgu

Christians allow persecution of gays?

Pope Francis sent shock waves around the globe last July when in addressing the issue of gays in the church, he opted not to remind his 1.6 billion followers about the fiery pits of hell but instead posed a question: Who am I to judge?



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hpvDMQ

Could plane go into ocean intact?

Each day brings new questions about the mystery of Flight 370. Jim Sciutto and an expert panel answer your questions.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hpvDME

Hurdles to underwater search

The search above the water for missing Flight 370 is now turning into an underwater search challenge.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1iPIKGH

Turkey's PM Erdogan declares victory

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan dominated debates leading up to Sunday's local elections, even though he wasn't on the ballot.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hpvCIN

Landslide deaths 18; 30 still missing

Pastor Gary Ray stood before his congregation Sunday, prepared for people to shake their fists at God. Such reactions in the only church in Oso, Washington, would have been entirely appropriate.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hpvCIB

New Zealand win HK Rugby Sevens

New Zealand turned on the style to beat England 26-7 in Sunday's final of the Hong Kong Sevens as they ran in four tries in a comprehensive victory.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hP3yuB

Rivals unite in hunt for missing jet

CNN's Jim Clancy reports on the united effort to help missing Flight 370.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hF1ZiX

On board a surveillance mission

The P8 Poseidon dips to the marked spot on the right, tipping closer towards the newly set search zone in the southern Indian Ocean.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1plXgc6

Egypt to hold elections in May

Egypt's presidential elections will take place on May 26 and 27, Egyptian media reported Sunday, citing an announcement by the country's Presidential Elections Commission.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1dH6kX8

F1: Hamilton wins Malaysia GP

Lewis Hamilton led a Mercedes one-two at the Malaysian Grand Prix Sunday to underline the team's early domination of the 2014 Formula One season.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1odJ2wy

N. Korea: nuclear tests on table

North Korea said Sunday it "would not rule out" a new nuclear test as it defended its recent mid-range missile launch that triggered international condemnation.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gP64WI

Chinese families arrive in Malaysia, demand answers

Dozens of grieving relatives arrived in Kuala Lumpur hoping for answers on the fate of MH370.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fBd6Jq

Syria frees 2 kidnapped journalists

Two Spanish journalists held more than six months in Syria are on their way home, Spain's El Mundo newspaper reported Sunday.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fBd6Jh

3 mystery objects from MH370?

New video shows several objects that were recovered by crews in the newest Flight 370 search area.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gbRuT3

Critics: Malaysia made 'missteps'

Malaysian officials are accused of investigation missteps in search of missing jet. CNN's Nic Robertson reports.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gbOCFO

Ebola death toll hits 70 in Guinea

At least 70 people are reported to have died from Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Guinea, according to a statement from the West African nation's health ministry.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fAnjWz

Golf: Mickelson pulls out of Texas Open

Tiger Woods is dealing with a back injury and doesn't know if he'll be able to play at the Masters next month. He may not be the only multiple major winner from the U.S. struggling to be ready for Augusta.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1iMrwtV

Suicide bomber kills 3 in Lebanon

A suicide bomber blew up a booby-trapped car, killing three soldiers and wounding four others at an army checkpoint in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, according to the National News Agency (NNA).



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gObP6Z

Cuba tries to woo foreign investors

Few would say Cuba is an easy place to do business, but a new law aimed at bringing pep to an anemic economy may lure more foreign investors.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1ocsTYi

Tennis: Serena nets seventh Miami title

Serena Williams is almost unstoppable in Miami. She showed that again Saturday.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/QswGSD

Football: Chelsea loss dents title hopes

Even when Chelsea held a nine-point lead over Manchester City atop English football's Premier League, Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho always maintained his team wasn't the favorite. He is being proved right.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fzmwox

How culling really saves animals

It is easy to criticize zoos and aquariums when healthy animals are culled, particularly when they are from endangered species. It's not always easy to understand the logic behind such a decision, but to get a picture of why good zoos take particular actions, one has to understand the context and the alternatives.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1g3taCY

Football: Capello writes off England

It might be Brazil. Argentina, perhaps. Maybe Spain will reign again. But it is highly likely it won't be England who lift the World Cup in Rio this July, says their former boss Fabio Capello.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fsb2Dm

Football: Messi settles Catalan derby

The Spanish title race might have taken another twist Saturday when Barcelona visited Espanyol in the Catalan derby. For more than 75 minutes, the home team blanked Lionel Messi and the rest of the Barcelona attack. But Messi ultimately had the last word.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jI8d8A

Gadhafi son apologizes to Libya

Libyan state television has aired a video of Moammar Gadhafi's son Saadi in which he apologized to the nation from prison.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1iLC8cA

Moment of silence for U.S. landslide

As rescue teams struggle to find possible bodies buried in mud, the state of Washington will hold a moment of silence Saturday at the exact hour one week ago when a landslide struck a rural community, killing 17 people.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hlGHKQ

F1: Record setting pole for Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton grabbed his second straight pole position to begin the 2014 Formula One season. But he hopes the Malaysian Grand Prix goes better than the opener in Melbourne.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hJH66c

Army dolphins to 'switch nationalities'

Just when you thought this divorce couldn't get any messier.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gF7y5M

N. Korea slams Park's 'dumb' speech

North Korea has launched a vitriolic attack on South Korea's President Park Geun-hye over comments she made about the country's nuclear program, accusing her of "blabbering" like a "peasant woman."



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1dzmbXy

Ukraine's Vitali Klitschko pulls out of presidential race

The boxer-turned-politician pulls out of Ukraine's presidential race and throws his weight behind a billionaire businessman.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1f4u8CO

Is Russia about to invade Ukraine?

Karl Penhaul examines the growing Ukrainian military presence on Ukraine's border with Russia



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1k3Cf2w

On the Russia-Ukraine border

CNN's Karl Penhaul reports from the Ukrainian border with Russia where military personnel and civilians are preparing.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1g9RXVX

Disappearance similar to 1977 tragedy

The disappearance of Flight 370 triggers memories of a deadly hijacking in 1977 of another Malaysia Airlines flight, in which all 100 people on board died.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1o3Iidi

Buddhists target Myanmar aid groups

The United States has expressed "deep concern" about mob violence reportedly targeting international NGOs operating in Myanmar's restive west.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jC1xJi

Firefight outside Kabul compound

Two explosions erupted outside of Afghanistan's election commission compound in Kabul Saturday, a commission employee told CNN. Following the blasts, militants took up combat positions outside the compound and engaged in a fire fight with Afghan security forces, said Mohammad Dawran.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1dD7qTU

1 dead, 16 hurt in Pakistan blast

A 5-year old girl was killed and 16 people injured in a deadly blast in Pakistan's volatile southwestern Balochistan province, police said on Saturday.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1h5mFQj

Indian cargo plane crashes, 5 dead

An Indian air force cargo plane crashed during a routine training mission Friday, authorities said.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1o6Ekkh

Landslide search is 'like Katrina'

Washington landslide rescuers are comparing the search efforts to that of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hIeom5

Why Saudis unfriended the U.S.

The world's most powerful democracy and the world's most absolute monarchy have long been close, if unlikely, allies.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hr1ARb

Inside a surveillance aircraft

Paula Newton takes viewers inside a P-3 Orion airplane to learn about how it and its crews help the search for MH370



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1oaiSe4

DJ Avicii hospitalized, cancels gig

Superstar DJ Avicii canceled his Ultra Festival performance this weekend to undergo gall bladder surgery.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jients

Interpol: Our database isn't slow

Interpol has rebutted Malaysia's explanation for not checking an international database of lost and stolen passports when passengers boarded Flight 370, an omission that may have allowed two Iranian men with stolen passports onto the plane.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gAHGqL

Opinion: Don't blame pilots

Could the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have been the result of human intervention? Les Abend says the odds are against it.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gAHE2c

El-Sisi to run for president in Egypt

Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has declared his candidacy in the national elections expected later this year in Egypt.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fwgEMQ

Scott leaves $9M estate to Jagger

L'Wren Scott left her entire estate to her longtime lover, Mick Jagger, according to the late fashion designer's will.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hzXrdL

Tennis: Serena reaches Miami final

World No. 1 Serena Williams sails through her semifinal against Maria Sharapova with a straight-sets win in Miami, beating the Russian for the 15th time in a row to set up the chance of a seventh title at Crandon Park.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1dwRN09

Planes, ships scour new area

Eight search aircraft set off Saturday from Australia to find the missing Malaysian jetliner in the southern Indian Ocean, where experts believe it ended up.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jG2gsR

How much does the search cost?

After weeks of false leads, there's still no sign of Flight 370. Tom Foreman reports on the rising costs of the search.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fw8zYB

Time to 'hold Russia accountable'

Sen. Robert Menendez says Russia's moves into Ukraine now require a swift and biting response from the U.S. and the West.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jSI3Ma

Why it's bad for FB to gobble Oculus

Paul Saffo says it's harmful for Silicon Valley innovation ecology when tech giants acquire start-ups.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/O0CiRZ

5.1-magnitude quake hits L.A.

A 5.1-magnitude earthquake hit the Los Angeles area Friday night, the USGS reported.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1g9beqD

First gay couples marry in UK

Andrew Wale is a writer and actor. His partner, Neil Allard, is a guesthouse owner. Together, they helped make history.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1iI5qbP

Bloomberg editor quits over China story

A senior Bloomberg News journalist quit his role earlier this month, saying the "mishandling" by his bosses of a story critical of China was behind his departure, amid suggestions that the New York-based company is pushing a financial strategy for China that overshadows editorial autonomy.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1k2nJbp

Why capitalism needs an upgrade

Mitch Kapor and Ben Jealous worry that a lack of diversity in tech firms is stalling innovation in Silicon Valley. Capitalism, they say, remains our nation's operating system but the current version needs an upgrade



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1fufIsg

Djokovic gets free pass into Miami final

Novak Djokovic got more good luck at the Miami Masters on Friday. For the second time during the tournament, he benefited from a walkover. Now he's into the final.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1ftSCSN

Obama praises aid plan for Ukraine

President Barack Obama praised a preliminary loan agreement between the International Monetary Fund and Ukraine, and said the United States will do its part to help, too.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1g4cBXu

Families pray for miracles

With each passing day, the toll grows from a mountain that moved, a massive landslide that swallowed houses and trailers in Washington's Cascade Mountains.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1g2Dwmo

Countries unite in search

CNN's Jim Clancy reports on the united effort to help missing Flight 370.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hF1ZiX

Journalist killed in Cairo clashes

A journalist was among three people killed Friday during clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and Egyptian security forces in eastern Cairo, Egypt's Interior Ministry said.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1ftuvDH

Football: Dutch turn to coach Hiddink

Guus Hiddink will replace Louis van Gaal as coach of the Dutch national after this summer's World Cup finals in Brazil.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hEGUVK

Beers and cheers at HK Sevens

The annual sporting jamboree is the highlight of the social calendar for rugby fans who flock to the Hong Kong Stadium in their thousands.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1dSgEXb

Spotters gather fresh clues

Hala Gorani speaks with Kyung Lah who flew aboard U.S. search plane.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jfGsBM

40,000 troops reported near border

40,00 Russian troops are near Ukraine's border, according to U.S. official. Karl Penhaul reports.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1ft2nR7

Obamacare: Uphill all the way

BARACK OBAMA signed the Affordable Care Act on March 23rd, 2010. Exactly four years later J. Louis Felton, a pastor in Philadelphia, led his flock in an unusual procession: out of church and onto a sales bus owned by a local insurer. “We need to sign up,” Mr Felton says. “People in our communities have never had the opportunity to get health coverage before.” On the bus he prayed for Obamacare’s success.It could use some help. The fight over the law makes mud-wrestling look decorous. This year Obamacare is, yet again, Republicans’ favourite weapon on the campaign trail. On March 25th it was, yet again, debated in the Supreme Court (see article). Meanwhile, Mr Obama continues to undermine his own law by delaying parts of it: this month officials said Americans could keep old plans that don’t comply with Obamacare for another two years.America is the world’s only rich country not to have universal health care. Obamacare was meant to address that. In the past insurers charged the sick higher rates than the...



from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1jz5gHm

Catholics in America: What crisis?

Now pray, José

IN HIS eighth-floor office overlooking a snow-covered city, Father José Hoyos has just finished writing a book about faith and healing, his fourth on the topic. This one contains stories from cancer patients about the miraculous shrinking of tumours that had once seemed unstoppable. Father Hoyos (pictured) was born in Colombia but has been in Arlington, Virginia, for 25 years. On most Sundays he can be found in one of the diocese’s churches, healing by prayer or livening up services by getting worshippers to act out Bible stories.Often, though, people who want to hear him must travel further. In January he was preaching in Guatemala; later in the year he will preach in Colombia, Honduras, Panama, Mexico and Ecuador. “When I went to Bolivia, 10,000 people came to hear me,” he says. “Many of them said they knew me already because they had relatives in DC.”Is the pope Hispanic?As Father Hoyos’s wanderings suggest, American Catholicism is becoming knitted into a broader Latin American faith. This matters, even for those who care little for religion. Catholic institutions are estimated to employ more than 1m people. (...



from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1jz5dvg

Obamacare and religious freedom: The Hobby Lobby hubbub

ON March 25th the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare”, was back before the Supreme Court. Two years ago the justices upheld most of the law. This week they heard oral arguments in Sebelius v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v Sebelius. These two consolidated cases concern Obamacare’s “contraceptive mandate”—the requirement that businesses offering their employees health insurance must provide plans that cover all federally-approved contraception methods at no extra cost to their employees.Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties are both owned by Christians who believe that some of those contraceptive methods are tantamount to abortion, because they can prevent a fertilised egg from implanting in the uterus. The owners seek an exemption to the contraceptive mandate under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a statute that Congress passed almost unanimously in 1993. This says that “government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability”, unless the law is the...



from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/P6ChNl

Presidential libraries: Style and guile

“AT THEIR best, they are lively classrooms of democracy,” says Richard Norton Smith, a historian who specialises in presidential libraries. They are also something of a misnomer. People who wander in expecting to borrow “The Cat in the Hat” tend to find instead a museum, a replica of the Oval Office and many floors of documents.Last week the Barack Obama Foundation invited applications from institutions interested in giving room to the 14th presidential library. Marty Nesbitt, a member of the foundation board and a friend of the Obamas, says a shortlist of sites will be presented to Mr and Mrs Obama early next year. The foundation wants to create an institution that reflects the commander-in-chief’s values and priorities, as well as serving as a “force for good in the surrounding community”.Columbia University in New York, the president’s alma mater, is preparing a bid. So too is his birth state of Hawaii. But Chicago, with its strong Obama ties, is assumed to be the front-runner. Mr Obama worked as a community organiser in the South Side, represented the area as a state senator, and was on the faculty of the University of Chicago for 12 years. A...



from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/P6ChwJ

America’s awful airports: A new ranking

SOGGY pizza, surly security staff and endless queues: American airports offer a shabby welcome to the greatest nation on earth. On March 26th Skytrax, a consultancy, released its list of the world’s 100 best airports. The highest-ranked in America was tiny Cincinnati, at 27th.The Economist delved into data on over 1m flights in 2013. For the most popular routes leaving America (see map), jets almost always land at an airport which is more highly-rated than the one from which they took off. We estimate that altogether 67% of people who fly out of America arrive at a better airport. The huddled masses deserve better.



from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/P6CeRv

Politics in Arizona: Saner than it looks

Neither red nor blue but both

IN SCOTTSDALE, a prosperous suburb of Phoenix, around 150 developers and estate agents are sweating politely under the unforgiving Arizona sun as they listen to each of six Republicans explain why he or she should be elected governor. Arizona has earned a reputation for wackiness, but the political mischief here is of the ordinary sort. Taxes must drop, some candidates insist, although services must be maintained. The construction industry is pandered to, its tax breaks defended.To outsiders Arizona is known for tin-eared reactionary politics, from demurring over whether to mark Martin Luther King’s birthday to passing a law, later gutted by the Supreme Court, which empowered local police to enforce federal immigration rules (and which critics say encouraged racial profiling). A few weeks ago Jan Brewer, the outgoing governor, vetoed SB 1062, a bill that would have given private firms a religious-freedom defence if they refused to serve gay customers. Arizona, says Fred DuVal, a Democrat running for governor, has a “unique tendency for no filters”.Yet it has elected Democratic governors and...



from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1jz5cHH

Copper: Broken contacts

THE copper price has long been held to signal the state of the global economy as reliably as the metal conducts electrons. But that reputation—never fully deserved—is now in tatters. Copper’s plunging price (see chart) says a lot about China, but little about the rest of the world.China consumes about 40% of global copper production. But not all of that goes straight into manufacturing or construction. Chinese companies have also been using copper as collateral for their hard-currency loans: “buy, store, hedge and pledge” in the words of one trader. That has led to an overhang, with far more of the metal stockpiled than users need. Any change in the conditions that created this stockpile can have a big effect on the price.A sign of this is that when the Chinese economy slows, as seems to be happening now, with manufacturing activity weakening for a fifth consecutive month, those stockpiles rise. CRU, a metals researcher, now says the copper-market surplus this year will be four times bigger than it previously estimated, with forecast production outpacing demand by 140,000 tonnes.Chinese data are notoriously opaque, so judging the real health of...



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1jRiw6a

Anti-social media: Ashes of a coalfire

I’ve unfriended him, too

SHEDDING his reputation as a carefree playboy took Nat Rothschild a decade of dealmaking. Gaining one for peppery imprudence took only a few hours.In a spectacular public spat, Mr Rothschild (part of a family which owns a stake in this newspaper) swapped insults on Twitter, a microblogging service, with his former business partner, Aga Bakrie, marking the end of a troubled investment in Indonesian commodities.In 2010 Mr Rothschild brought a coal-mining company, then called Bumi, to a London stock-exchange listing in what at the time seemed a notable coup, marrying the industrial muscle of an Indonesian family conglomerate with the financial expertise embodied in his surname. But the venture soon turned sour, amid falling coal prices and fierce rows over corporate governance. On March 25th the divorce was finalised and the Bakrie group bought back its stake in Bumi, severing ties with Asia Resource Minerals, part-owned by Mr Rothschild.The bitterness of the dispute (which involved lurid allegations of corporate espionage, fraud and bad faith) soon bubbled over. Mr Rothschild tweeted a sardonic thanks to Mr...



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1hektdK

Swiss banks: Swissness is not enough

LIKE their country’s watchmakers, Swiss banks have enjoyed a reputation for quality, reliability and watertight discretion. But since 2008, spectacular coups by neighbouring countries’ tax authorities and investigations by America’s Department of Justice have torn at their reputation. Now they are trying to rebuild one as squeaky-clean money managers.The deceptive calm of shoppers on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich belies the turmoil behind the doors of nearby financial institutions. Foreign banks are selling out. The biggest Swiss names are dogged by litigation and calls for more capital just as costs are rising and margins falling. On March 13th they lost a prominent client: Uli Hoeness, president of Bayern Munich football club, was jailed for three-and-a-half years by a Munich court for avoiding tax on money in a Swiss bank account.It is now clear to even the most obstinate Swiss banker that he must change his game or face ruin. Four of the classic Swiss private banks, Pictet, Lombard Odier, Mirabaud and La Roche, have opted for limited liability, ending the owners’ total responsibility for the core bank—mainly because of the risk these days of...



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1hekqi2

Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Sorry, no vacancies

A grain of hope

AFRICAN businesses are reluctant employers. A given firm in Sub-Saharan Africa typically has 24% fewer people on its books than equivalent firms elsewhere, according to a recent paper from the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a think-tank based in Washington, DC. Given the links between employment and development, economists want to figure out the reasons for the shortfall.The study calculates the missing jobs by crunching information on 41,000 formal businesses globally from a World Bank survey. The data capture only a sliver of what actually happens in Africa: nine in ten workers have an informal job. Shunned by the formal sector, workers turn to below-the-radar employment—toiling on family farms or otherwise beyond the government’s reach. But a big informal sector makes it harder for Africa to reduce poverty, even when economic growth is strong. Increases in income on the production side of the economy translate weakly into higher wages for workers. Indeed the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction is weaker in Africa than any other developing region.Several factors explain African bosses’...



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1jRiACW

Free exchange: Pricing the surge

NEW competitors always ruffle a few feathers. The unique thing about Uber, a new taxi-market player, is that it seems to have annoyed some of its customers as much as the incumbent cabbies it threatens. The problem is its “surge pricing”, which can make the cost of Uber rides jump to many times the normal fare at weekends and on holidays. Gouging customers like this, critics reckon, will eventually make them flee, denting Uber’s business. Microeconomics suggests that although Uber’s model does have a flaw, its dynamic pricing should be welcomed.Taxi markets have long needed a shake-up. In theory, entry should be easy—all that is needed is a car and a driving licence—with new drivers keeping cab fares close to costs. Yet in many cities, cabs are far from that competitive ideal. Decades of regulation conspire to keep entrants out. In New York a pair of taxi medallions sold at a 2013 auction for $2.5m; many other cities have similar schemes. In London “the knowledge”, a test of familiarity with the city’s streets which GPS has made redundant but drivers still have to pass, can take four years to complete. Taxi markets often end up suspiciously clubby, with cabs in short supply and fat...



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/OY6oXs

Inflation and interest rates: Up, up and away

AT FIRST glance, rich-world central banks are going their separate ways. Cheered by sturdy growth figures, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve are shuffling toward an exit from easy monetary policy; markets found Janet Yellen’s first Fed statement unexpectedly hawkish. The European Central Bank, in contrast, is tacking looser. On March 25th Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, suggested that the ECB might need to be more forceful in order to keep the euro-area economy out of the grips of deflation.

Look again, however, and the path forward appears similar across the rich world: low interest rates stretch off into the visible distance. The outlook is clearest in Europe, where the ECB may toy with negative rates as a means to fend off deflation. But even in America and Britain “normal” rates are a distant prospect. In February Mark Carney, the Bank of England’s governor, promised that eventual rate rises would happen...



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1o4uBe8

Buttonwood: Freedom or licence?

LET the pensioners free. That was the rallying cry of the recent British budget, which decreed that those who accumulate a pension pot no longer must use the proceeds to buy an annuity on retiring.The change will bring Britain into line with America and Australia, where those retiring have immediate access to their pension pots. But Canada, Singapore and Sweden still impose fairly tight restrictions on what they can do with their money, as do Denmark and the Netherlands, two countries with widely-admired pension schemes.Many people believe annuities, which transform a pot of cash into regular payments until the beneficiary dies, are a bad deal. Certainly, the failure of Britons to shop around for the best rate when they retire (the so-called open-market option) means that some lose out. But the two main reasons why annuity rates have fallen are fundamental; first, people are living longer and second, the general level of interest rates has fallen.Pensioners exercising their new-found freedom need to take account of both factors. In 1960 British males who reached the retirement age of 65 could expect to live a further 12 years; now it is almost 19...



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1dQRA2N

American banks: A harsh light

THE current mood in America’s financial markets is enthusiasm for companies that can receive investment now with the prospect of using it to make more in the future. The exceptions are banks, for whom the ability to return capital now rather than later is seen as a critical indicator of health. On March 26th the Federal Reserve disclosed the results of its “comprehensive capital analysis and review” determining which of the country’s 30 largest banks could increase their dividends and share buybacks.The precise criteria are deliberately kept murky to stop banks gaming them, and the results produced some shocks. Most banks had their plans approved but Citigroup and the American operations of HSBC, RBS Citizens and Santander were all rejected while Goldman Sachs and Bank of America passed only by tweaking their submissions. One other institution, Zions Bancorporation, had its plan rejected as well but this had been expected because it had flunked an earlier stage of the test.For Citi, the results were a disaster. Its shares fell 6% in after-market trading. “We are deeply disappointed”, said Michael Corbat, its chief executive. Sympathy may be scarce...



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1j9pWDj

New roles for technology: Rise of the robots

ROBOTS came into the world as a literary device whereby the writers and film-makers of the early 20th century could explore their hopes and fears about technology, as the era of the automobile, telephone and aeroplane picked up its reckless jazz-age speed. From Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” to “WALL-E” and the “Terminator” films, and in countless iterations in between, they have succeeded admirably in their task.Since moving from the page and screen to real life, robots have been a mild disappointment. They do some things that humans cannot do themselves, like exploring Mars, and a host of things people do not much want to do, like dealing with unexploded bombs or vacuuming floors (there are around 10m robot vacuum cleaners wandering the carpets of the world). And they are very useful in bits of manufacturing. But reliable robots—especially ones required to work beyond the safety cages of a factory floor—have proved hard to make, and robots are still pretty stupid. So although they fascinate people, they have not yet made much of a mark on the world.That seems about to change. The exponential growth in the power of silicon chips, digital...



from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/P6C3Wt

NATO: All for one

IN 1997, when the world was a gentler place, NATO and Russia came to a far-reaching security agreement. As part of this, the Kremlin accepted the idea that several countries from the former Warsaw Pact would become full members of the alliance; in return, NATO agreed not to mass lots of troops, equipment and nuclear missiles on Russia’s border. Now Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has annexed Crimea and is threatening eastern Ukraine. This is particularly scary for the three Baltic states which became members of NATO in 2004: Estonia and Latvia both have Russian-speaking minorities of the sort Mr Putin “protected” in Crimea, while Lithuania stands between mother Russia and its Kaliningrad exclave. All three have been a target for Russian mischief, from cyberattacks to mock invasions.The Balts worry that the West will not protect them (see article). It is not hard to see why. Mr Putin has an inkling that NATO’s newer members are second-class citizens. There is some truth to this. For a long time before Russia’s annexation of...



from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/P6C3Wj

France’s National Front: On the march

THE strong showing by Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN) in local elections on March 23rd has stunned France. The FN won its first significant mayoralty since 1995, and is likely to take several more in the second round on March 30th (see article). Ms Le Pen has proclaimed the end of France’s cosy political duopoly. The FN may now come top in May’s European elections. And it is no longer absurd to see Ms Le Pen emulating the achievement in April 2002 of her father, Jean-Marie, by getting into the second round of the 2017 presidential election.This is not a one-off success: Ms Le Pen’s strength has been growing for some time. She took a bigger share of the vote in the first round of the 2012 presidential election than her father did ten years earlier. Since she replaced him as FN leader in 2011, she has done much to detoxify the party’s brand: the anti-Semitism, for instance, has mostly gone. A segment of the electorate is taken with Ms Le Pen’s frankness and throaty charm. For such voters, many of them working-class...



from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1jz54rG

Cartel-busting: Boring can still be bad

MENTION price cartels and many people will think of big, overt ones like the one OPEC runs for oil and the now-extinct one for diamonds. But at least as damaging are the many secret cartels in such unglamorous areas as ball-bearings and cargo rates, which go on unnoticed for years, quietly bumping up the end cost to consumers of all manner of goods and services.Collusion among producers to rig prices and carve up markets is thriving, with the cartels growing ever more intricate and global in scope (see article). Competition authorities have uncovered several whopping conspiracies in recent years, including one in which more than 20 airlines worldwide had fixed prices on perhaps $20 billion of freight shipments. They were fined a total of $3 billion; and so far the compensation claims from ripped-off customers comfortably exceed $1 billion. One academic study found that the typical cartel raised the price of the goods or services in question by 20%. Another suggested that cartels were robbing poor countries...



from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/P6C5xA

America and the IMF: Dereliction of duty

ANYONE who doubts the importance of the International Monetary Fund should look at Ukraine. Every Western nation is talking about helping the Ukrainians resist Vladimir Putin. In terms of immediate cash, America has come up with $1 billion of loan guarantees, while the European Union has found €1.6 billion ($2.2 billion) of budget support. The IMF, meanwhile, is discussing lending Ukraine’s government about $15 billion. It is the only outfit capable of mobilising large sums fast. That is why, for the past 70 years, the fund has been the world’s financial firefighter. And it is why Congress’s refusal to support reforms to strengthen it is shockingly shortsighted.The reforms in question concern the IMF’s system of “quotas”. Each country’s quota determines how much it pays in, its clout in the organisation and how much it can borrow if it gets into trouble. America’s quota is the biggest, giving it veto power. But today’s system gives excessive heft to small countries in Europe and too little to emerging economies. And, at $370 billion, the total value of the quotas is modest compared with the scale of global capital flows. That is why, during the 2008-...



from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1jz54b4

Turkish politics: The battle for Turkey’s future

RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN has reason to thank Vladimir Putin. For weeks the Russian president’s attack on Ukraine has hogged headlines. This has let Turkey’s prime minister get away with only limited international opprobrium for a string of illiberal laws that seem designed mainly to protect himself and his allies from a corruption scandal that one insider calls the biggest in modern Turkish history.Since the scandal broke in mid-December, when police raided the homes of several sons of ministers, illicit recordings have emerged on the internet supposedly implicating Mr Erdogan, his relatives and others in dodgy dealings. Mr Erdogan has denounced these as fabrications, and blamed a network of judges, prosecutors and police linked to Fethullah Gulen, a powerful Sunni Muslim cleric based in Pennsylvania. (The irony that Mr Gulen was an ally of Mr Erdogan in his previous legal battles against the army and the secularists has not escaped Turks.)Mr Erdogan has reassigned or sacked hundreds of policemen, judges and prosecutors, stalling the investigation. He has passed laws giving the government greater control over the judiciary and security services, clamped down on the...



from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/QjSbF2

The Baltic states: Echoes of the Sudetenland

“WE FEEL uneasy, but we must not get in a hysterical mood,” says Edgars Rinkevics, Latvia’s foreign minister. As the Ukrainian crisis continues, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, the three Baltic states, are increasingly exposed to Russian pressure, for historical, geographic and linguistic reasons. If it weren’t for their NATO membership, the Baltic trio would feel almost as vulnerable as in 1938-39, after Hitler had annexed the Sudetenland under the pretext of needing to protect the local German population and during the run-up to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Speaking of parallels between then and now, Mr Rinkevics notes that: “For us, there are a lot of emotions.”Few countries know Russia as well as the Baltic states do. They were part of the Russian empire for centuries and were subjugated by the Soviet Union for 50 years. Around a quarter of Estonia’s people and 27% of Latvia’s are native Russian-speakers (see map), though nearly all Balts speak some Russian and many are bilingual. In Latvia one in five marriages is mixed.Even so, Baltic leaders’ warnings about Russian expansionism have tended to go unheeded by their allies in NATO and the...



from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/QjSboy

Russian propaganda: 1984 in 2014

The pen, but also the sword

FIREWORKS, concerts, uplifting speeches and patriotic euphoria: the Kremlin is celebrating the annexation of Crimea as though Russia had won the second world war (again) rather than grabbing a piece of land from a smaller and weaker neighbour. The public seems intoxicated by victory in a war that was begun, conducted and won largely through propaganda.Russians have been subjected to an intense, aggressive and blunt disinformation campaign in which they were bombarded by images of violence, chaos and fascism in Ukraine, sinister plotting by the West and evidence of Russia’s strength and nobility in response. The Russian media have always shaped reality as much as they have reflected it. But in the seizure of Crimea, television played as much of a leading role as the army. Russian television, widely watched in Crimea, bolstered the loyalty of the local population while justifying the Kremlin’s actions at home.The propaganda campaign has seen several stages since the protests on Kiev’s Maidan began, says Lev Gudkov, head of the Levada Centre, an independent pollster. It portrayed Maidan as a conspiracy by the...



from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/QjSakv

French elections: A little local difficulty

THE ruling Socialists were braced for bad local-election results. But for President François Hollande’s party the first round on March 23rd was scalding. The governing left took 38% of the vote, far behind the mainstream right on 46%. The Socialists came humiliatingly third in several towns. Numerically, the round was won by the centre-right UMP party. But the symbolic victor was Marine Le Pen’s populist National Front (FN).The Socialists may hang on to some big cities after the second round on March 30th, including Paris. Although their mayoral candidate, Anne Hidalgo, came second to the UMP’s Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the Socialists have done a deal with the Greens that should secure a narrow majority for the left in the run-off. In other places the Socialists are in an awkward spot, nowhere more so than in Marseille. The left had hoped to win the city, where the ruling UMP has failed to curb a violent organised-crime wave. Yet the Socialist candidate, Patrick Mennucci, came third.This was Mr Hollande’s first mid-term test, and voters made clear their exasperation at his failure to cut unemployment or revive growth, and at his government’s ineptness. Despite efforts to make this an election about local matters, those who voted took their discontent with him to the ballot box. Many preferred to stay away altogether, especially among under-25s who had backed Mr Hollande...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1jRo4gV

Turkey and the internet: Of tweets and twits

THE beleaguered Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, must be scared. Why else, many Turks ask, would a court on March 20th have blocked access to Twitter? Mr Erdogan vowed to “wipe out” the social-media site “no matter what the rest of the world has to say about it”. Douglas Frantz, an American State Department official, likened the move to “21st-century book-burning”. Neelie Kroes, the European digital commissioner, called it “cowardly”.No sooner was the ban announced than millions of users swapped tips on how to beat it. The number of in-country tweets soared, with the hashtag #Erdoganisadictator leading the list. Turkey then became the first government to block Google DNS, which is a popular way of evading online censorship. Users turned to virtual private networks for continued access. On March 26th a court in Ankara issued an injunction against the Twitter ban. But it remains in force, and Mr Erdogan is threatening to go after Facebook and YouTube.The official reason for the Twitter ban was that the site’s administrators refused to remove content deemed by local courts “to be in violation of personal rights and privacy.” Few doubt, however, that...



from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1dvYCiy

Charlemagne: Putin’s arrow

UNWITTINGLY, perhaps, Vladimir Putin is playing Cupid to America’s Mars and Europe’s Venus. By seizing Crimea, he has rekindled the love lost between the transatlantic allies. As with so many old couples, irritation has built up in recent years: over the war in Iraq, how to fight jihadi terrorism, the NSA spying scandals, the euro crisis and Europe’s ever-shrinking defence budgets. Now Russia is reminding both sides of the ties that bind. “I have not felt this good about transatlantic relations in a long time,” whispers one senior European politician.After his “pivot” to Asia, events in Ukraine are forcing Barack Obama back to the old continent. His trip to Europe this week was dominated by the issue of Russian militarism. Fittingly, perhaps, Mr Obama began in Belgium by honouring fallen American soldiers of the first world war, when Europe’s security first became an American concern. To turn a blind eye to the redrawing of borders by force, Mr Obama said, would be to “ignore the lessons that are written in the cemeteries of this continent.” Yet the new affection is more than just a return to Europe’s dependence on American protection via...



from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1dvYyiT

Immigrants from the future

SCHAFT, A BLUE-LIMBED robot, lifts its right foot to the seventh step of the ladder, its left foot to the eighth, and stops; it sways alarmingly in the strong Florida sea breeze. Of the 17 teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a first-of-its-kind event held at a speedway track near Miami in December 2013, only two others got their robots this high up the ladder. One of those two then took a nasty tumble.For most of a minute SCHAFT is still, except for a flap on its chest that slowly rises and falls in a breathing motion. Then it springs into action again. Its left knee straightens, its right foot rises, its left knee bends again—not forwards, as a human knee would, but backwards—and in four swift movements it firmly plants both feet on the platform at the top of the ladder.With this latest triumph SCHAFT has become the undisputed champion of the DRC. In the past two days it has driven a small jeep-like car over a short, twisting course, walked over ramps, steps and rubble, negotiated various doorways, cleared debris from its path, cut a hole in a wall with a power tool, connected a fire hose and shut off a series of valves. Now, as the Japanese...



from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/QjSgss

Business service robots: The invisible unarmed

THE ANNOUNCEMENT IN November 2013 by Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, that he wanted to use drones for deliveries was, to many in the industry, something of a stretch. Applying drones safely on such a scale without line-of-sight control, and re-engineering the company’s logistics model accordingly, would be a big undertaking. But it generated a lot of media interest, and just in time for Christmas, too. His company’s most serious commitment to robotics to date—its acquisition in early 2012 of Kiva, a company whose robots move shelves around in warehouses—got far less attention. This is one example of a pervasive quality of robotic technology: the high visibility of its promises and the near-invisibility of its successes.In the 1990s Danny Hillis, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, pointed out that when people talk about “technology” they really mean “everything that doesn’t work yet”; once technologies work they simply become computers, televisions, phones and the like. Robots suffer from a similar double standard. When they are seen as providing a reliable, routine solution to a problem—cleaning floors, for example—in some ways they cease being seen as robots....



from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1jRi9Ze

The build-up: Good and ready

ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Odense, a small city in southern Denmark, Enrico Krog Iversen shows off the building he has bought to serve as the new headquarters and assembly facility for Universal Robots, a company of which he is both the chief executive and a big shareholder. It is about ten times the size of the company’s current headquarters, a five-minute drive away. Universal Robots, founded in 2005 by academics from the nearby university, is growing pretty fast. In the past four years, says Mr Iversen, its sales have increased more than 40-fold. By 2017 he hopes for a turnover of DKr1 billion ($190m).Universal Robots makes robot arms that are light and easily programmed, and hence well suited to use in small manufacturing businesses. At €22,000 ($31,000) each, plus a similar amount in set-up costs, they are also affordable. Universal’s website is stuffed with case studies to demonstrate to potential buyers that the robots’ cost can be recouped in less than a year.The advent of robots that are cheap and safe enough to be used outside big factories is one reason for a resurgence of interest in robotics over the past few years. Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based company...



from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/QjSfoo

Military uses: Up in the air

AMERICA’S DECADE OF misbegotten war in the early 21st century will be remembered for many things, but when it comes to technology, the rise of the drone will stand out. When America invaded Iraq in 2003, it had a couple of hundred; by the time it left, it had almost 10,000.Pilotless aircraft had been around for decades. What was new was that, thanks to the Global Positioning System (GPS), they knew where they were, and thanks to better satellite and other communications links they could send back copious data. That allowed them to feed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) to all levels of America’s increasingly information-hungry armed forces. A platoon of soldiers wanting to look beyond the building in front of them; an intelligence agency tracking a target; a general staff trying to understand what was going on across a broad area: today there is a drone for them all.Throughout this entire period no drone, or indeed any other robot, was put through the full qualification process usually required for any new American weapons. They were sent into the field in various stages of unreadiness by people who saw a need for them. On the ground that need...



from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/P6CKix

Labour markets: A mighty contest

“OUR ROBOTS PUT people to work,” says the rejected slogan still on the whiteboard in Rodney Brooks’s office. It was meant to convey the belief that led Mr Brooks to start Rethink Robotics: that robots in small manufacturing businesses can create new jobs, or at least bring old ones back from China, thus helping to launch an American manufacturing renaissance. But the message could also be read another way: robot overlords forcing human helots into back-breaking labour. Better left unsaid.Small and medium-sized companies are between 20 and 200 times less likely to use robots than large ones in similar sectors, according to a study carried out by Metra Martech, a consultancy, for the IFR. They could thus become an important market if someone were to offer them the right robots, which would open up new sectors of the economy to the productivity gains that can come with automation. Such robots would still do routine tasks but would be able to switch from one set of tasks to another as required, perhaps every few weeks, perhaps a couple of times a day. They would therefore be heavily dependent on their human fellow workers to set them up and get them going.Rethink...



from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1rFKhUy

Domestic service robots: Seal of approval

WHEN TAKANORI SHIBATA began working on robots in the early 1990s, he had something practical in mind, perhaps to help the elderly with their daily chores. But he soon realised that robots were not really able to do anything useful, so he decided to make a robot that did not even try—but that could nevertheless deliver real benefits.The result of his labours, Paro, has been in development since 1998. It is 57cm long and looks like a baby harp seal. Thanks to an array of sub-skin sensors, it responds amiably to stroking; and though it cannot walk, it can turn its head at the sound of a human voice and tell one voice from another. It is a comforting and gentle presence in your arms, on your lap or on a table top, where it gives the impression of following a conversation. The best thing about it is that it seems to be helping in the care of people with dementia and other health problems.You could see Paro as a very well-designed $5,000 pet that will never turn on the person holding it, and will never be hurt if its master flies into a rage. It is as happy in one lap as the next, needs no house-training, can be easily washed and will not die. This makes it a much more...



from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1rFKhEd

Regulation: That thou art mindful of him

ISAAC ASIMOV WAS wrong to think that the laws of robotics would be hard-wired into every robot brain. He was right, though, to think that robots would need regulation, and that such regulation would cause heated debate on the role that they might play.In many of the areas touched on by this special report, laws and regulations will be crucial to the way that markets for robots develop. The uptake of industrial robots has always been constrained by health-and-safety considerations. Autonomy for lethal military robots remains a serious concern, soon to be discussed at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva. The spread of civilian drones will depend on freeing up airspace, along with bandwidth for their control. The advent of self-driving cars opens up all sorts of legal and regulatory issues.As Mr Gupta of the NSF points out, manufacturers’ technical ability to produce robots that can help in the home might easily outrun their capacity to deal with the resulting liability issues, especially if the robots operate in the homes of elderly people with cognitive difficulties. Sweet little Paro, rated as a consumer product in some places, is regulated in...



from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1rFKhDZ

Bello: Legalism v democracy

“WEAPONS have given you independence. Laws will give you freedom”. This pledge to Colombians by Francisco de Paula Santander, an independence leader, is inscribed above the portal of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá. Ever since Santander, Colombia has been the most legalistic country in Latin America. Perhaps not coincidentally, it has also been one of the most lawless.Colombia is less lawless these days. And its legal tradition often stands it in good stead. Its Constitutional Court knocked down a dubious effort by Álvaro Uribe, the country’s messianic president of 2002-10, to change the constitution to allow him a third consecutive term. In the 1980s dozens of judges preferred to die than buckle to drug traffickers.But rather than freedom, legalism can sometimes bring arbitrary decisions and political headaches—as in the case of Gustavo Petro. Mr Petro was elected as mayor of Bogotá in 2011. A leftist former guerrilla leader, he is outspoken and high-handed. His stewardship of Colombia’s capital, a city of 7.6m, was unpopular. He mixed some progressive measures—banning bullfighting and promoting gay marriage—with a bungled effort to return the private rubbish-...



from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1jRijjo

Data leaks: Going overboard

THEY have fewer than 30,000 inhabitants, but on paper the British Virgin Islands (BVI) pulled in $92 billion in foreign direct investment in 2013. Only the United States, China and Russia did better. Most of it went to the islands’ half-a-million shell companies. Offshore fees account for 60% of the budget.This is an industry that prizes discretion. So when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) began reporting last April on around 2.5m leaked documents that emanated from two offshore providers, shell-company owners were not the only ones to be livid. Officials feared loss of business to Hong Kong and Singapore: company registrations in the BVI were down by 23% in the final quarter of 2013. “The ICIJ has done us a lot of damage,” the premier’s wife told Le Monde in January.The islands have now come up with cybercrimes legislation that slaps a prison term of up to 20 years and a possible $1m fine on anyone, in any country, who leaks or publishes leaked information about a BVI offshore company—even if that information comes from a computer in Boston or Beijing. Passed by the House of Assembly this month, the bill needs the signature of the British-appointed governor.He should send it back. People have a right to financial privacy if they have done nothing wrong but the law makes no provision for a public-interest defence....

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1jRilrf

Brazil’s internet law: The net closes

“THE best possible birthday gift for Brazilian and global web users” is how Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, which turned 25 this month, described Brazil’s “internet bill of rights” in an open letter on March 24th. The next day legislators in the lower house of Congress duly approved it.The sweeping bill, which now goes to the Senate, is “pretty much one of a kind”, says Ronaldo Lemos, a lawyer and academic involved in creating the original proposal in 2009. It enshrines the principle of “net neutrality”, which holds that network operators must treat all traffic equally. It also ensures that 100m Brazilian internet users enjoy online privacy (by barring providers from rummaging through their data) and freedom of expression (a court order is required to force the removal of contentious content).Perfect it isn’t, however. Tucked into the bill is article 11, which extends the reach of Brazilian law to any internet service in the world with Brazilian users. A firm based in the United States whose services are used by Brazilians could, for example, be penalised for adhering to its domestic data-disclosure laws if they conflict with Brazil’s—as they often do. Penalties include fines of up to 10% of a firm’s Brazilian revenues or even blocking services.When the European Union mulled something similar following the revelations last year of widespread...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1jRikUd

Latin America’s economies: Life after the commodity boom

ONE morning last month Louis Dreyfus, a big commodity-trading house, formally opened a new $10m storage depot in the Peruvian port of Callao. Two of its six bunkers were piled high with 55,000 tonnes of fine brown dust covered by white tarpaulins—copper and zinc concentrate, awaiting blending and shipment. The warehouse is “a bet that Peruvian mining will continue to be competitive,” says Gonzalo Ramírez, a Dreyfus manager. That looks like a sound wager. Blessed with high-grade ores and cheap energy, Peru’s output of copper—already the world’s third-largest—will more than double in the next three years (see article), thanks to the opening of several low-cost mines.But rather than marking a new dawn, this burst of investment comes at the twilight of the great commodity boom occasioned by the industrialisation of China and India. By providing an unprecedented boost to the region’s terms of trade (the ratio of the price of its exports to that of its imports), this handed many Latin American countries a...



from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1j9t0iD

France and “la guerre de quatorze”: Never-forgotten names

Forged by war

MARNE, Somme, Verdun. The river plains of northern and eastern France are etched into the historiography of the first world war, just as the scars of battle—the remnants of trenches, the hundreds of military cemeteries—mark the French landscape. France was the main theatre of battle on the western front. It lost 1.4m soldiers, more than any other Western allied power. For France, the narrative of the war is not so much that of wasted lives and tragic loss as national heroism and glorious victory: the last time the country was unambiguously united on the right side of history.Much recent French academic work is a response to a school of thinking that emerged in the 1990s, which held that France nurtured a patriotic “culture of war”, which ensured a collective acceptance of conflict despite the horror, and sustained it through the notion of shared sacrifice and national unity.Historians today focus on the micro-detail: the lives and interaction in the trenches of the poilus (soldiers) and their officers. Nicolas Mariot’s “...



from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1g4gbky

Cartels: Just one more fix

THE International Cartel Workshop might sound like a coaching session for would-be price-fixers. But the biennial event, run by the International Bar Association, is in fact an opportunity for lawyers to learn how their clients can avoid falling foul of the law, how to respond if they do and what is on the minds of the competition officials who attend. The latest get-together, held in Rome in February, featured a three-day-long “hypothetical” in which delegates acted out a loosely scripted scenario featuring a fictional American camera-maker that discovers its sales team has been colluding with European and Japanese rivals, and tries to limit the damage by reporting the sin to the authorities.Grey suits, wooden acting and hour-long scenes about document discovery are not everyone’s idea of gripping drama. But cartel enforcement is a hot topic in boardrooms. Fines and jail terms have shot up in recent years, greatly raising the costs of collusion. Big firms such as GE and Bosch have assembled teams of in-house lawyers that focus solely on the issue.Even for the biggest companies, ensuring compliance is hard. On March 20th Brazil’s cartel office announced a probe...



from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/P6ALuC

Memoirs of a German soldier: Return of a war classic

Stuff happened

ERNST JÜNGER’S “Storm of Steel”, based on his diaries as a young and enthusiastic German volunteer during the first world war, was first published in 1920. It became a classic, and has appeared in German in another seven versions since. The earliest translation into English, in 1929, was not very good. Michael Hofmann’s version, which Penguin Classics first brought out in 2004, finally does the book justice, staying true throughout to the original’s boyish, action-packed, fast-paced and entirely unreflective tone.To Jünger, war is not a puzzle or disaster but merely an elemental force, like the storm in his title or any of the other metaphors he draws from nature. It is about young men being manly mostly and sometimes not; about soldiers doing soldiers’ jobs; and about things—mortars, shrapnel, splinters, bullets, gas—that kill and maim. If Jünger sees evil in all this, it is in the materiel, not in his human adversaries. British mortars have “something of personal vitriol. They are treacherous things.”...



from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1g4gagd

100 years after 1914: Still in the grip of the Great War

WITH four months to go before the centenary of the start of the first world war, the bombardment of new books from competing historians is growing heavier. Unlike many of the young men who went off to fight in 1914, nobody thinks it will all be over by Christmas.This is not surprising. The Great War has always been a publishing phenomenon. Around 25,000 books and scholarly articles have been written on it since 1918. The arguments have been conducted with forensic intensity and unwavering moral passion. The fascination with the war, which exerts its grip most powerfully in the “Anglosphere” countries, is justified. At least 10m men died in the conflict; more than twice that number were seriously injured. Those who bore mental scars for the remainder of their lives are uncounted, as are the civilians who died or who were damaged by bereavement or dislocation.For the first time, but not the last, the organisation and technology of sophisticated industrial societies were seamlessly and lethally joined. The war destroyed empires (some quickly, some more slowly), created fractious new nation-states, gave a sense of identity to the British dominions, forced America to...



from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1gG22Qo

Myanmar’s oil and gas: Drilling in the dark

AFTER a long wait, and several delays, Myanmar’s government will soon announce which companies have won the right to explore the bulk of its offshore oil and gas reserves. The outcome of the bidding for the 19 deep- and 11 shallow-water blocks is one of the most eagerly awaited events in the hydrocarbons industry. The competition attracted almost all the global giants, including Total, Shell, Statoil and Chevron. The winners expect to explore some of the most promising waters left in Asia, and possibly the world.Just how promising, however, is a subject of intense speculation, and not a little guesswork. Because of the long-running economic sanctions against Myanmar, introduced in the mid-1990s and only relaxed two years ago, almost no work has been done to determine the capacity of the country’s oil and gas fields, so estimates vary widely. The proven energy reserves are modest: 50m barrels of oil and 283 billion cubic metres of natural gas, the latter worth about $75 billion at today’s prices.It is the unofficial estimates that have lured the Shells and Chevrons. Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, which is state-owned, has put the reserves at 226m barrels of oil and 457 billion cubic metres of gas. Foreign oilmen agree that this could well be true. Those figures would put the Myanmar fields on a par with Britain’s North Sea before it was exploited, or Brazil’s reserves now....

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1rFIwqu

Commercial property in Europe: A skyscraper too far

AT LA DÉFENSE, Europe’s biggest purpose-built office complex, workers are putting the finishing touches to the Majunga Tower. The handsome 45-floor building (pictured) in the business district west of central Paris is due to open around August. There is only one drawback. The building, currently unlet, will add 63,000 square metres to a park where the vacancy rate already tops 12%. Another big building is scheduled to open in 2014.Vacancy rates can improve quickly, argues Olivier Gérard, who runs the Paris office of Cushman and Wakefield, a property consultant: these are big spaces for big clients, and relatively few leases will fill a building when firms feel more confident about the future. But only a few strides across La Défense’s wind-whipped main drag, the area’s biggest office block, Coeur Défense, fleetingly owned by now-defunct Lehman Brothers, is being sold again by its financially troubled current owners for a reported €1.3 billion ($1.8 billion) to an American investment outfit, Lone Star.La Défense epitomises a paradox about Europe’s commercial-property market: a new boom has begun before the previous bust has ended. To generalise broadly across a...



from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/P6AGqx

Schumpeter: A green light

ON MARCH 20th Exxon Mobil, surely the world’s least tree-hugging company, became the first oil giant to say it would publish details of its “stranded assets”—the value of oil and gas fields that it might not be able to exploit if there were a high carbon price or tough rules on greenhouse-gas emissions. Giant Exxon is not doing this because it has gone mushy or caved in to green activists. Rather, it is heading off a shareholder resolution by Arjuna Capital, a fund manager, demanding explanations and actions on environmental threats to the firm. Exxon’s decision is the biggest step so far in a wider business trend: companies publishing information on their environmental impact and vulnerability to green regulation, to attract or placate investors.Until the late 2000s, most firms saw the environment as either irrelevant or a bit of a nuisance. Either way, they did not publish much about it. That has changed drastically. According to CDP, a group that collects environmental data on behalf of investors, more than half the companies listed on the world’s 31 largest stock exchanges publish some environmental data, either in earnings reports, as part of stockmarket...



from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/P6ADes

Facebook and virtual reality: A game of goggles

So that’s what $2 billion looks like

AT SXSW, a techie festival that took place in Texas earlier this month, some lucky attenders were able briefly to immerse themselves in HBO’s fantasy television series, “Game of Thrones”. By donning virtual-reality goggles made by Oculus VR, people could see how the world looked from the top of the 700-foot-tall Wall that protects the Seven Kingdoms from enemies that lurk beyond. The digital rendition was so lifelike that gazing down from the Wall gave some folk vertigo.Such a compelling experience explains why Oculus Rift, the company’s virtual-reality headset, has captivated keen gamers. It has also caught the attention of Facebook, which announced on March 25th that it had bought Oculus VR for around $2 billion. This deal, which comprises $400m in cash and the rest in Facebook stock, comes not long after the social network’s purchase of WhatsApp, a messaging app, for $19 billion.WhatsApp at least has more than 450m users. Oculus VR, a startup that is less than two years old, has so far only sold its headsets to game developers. So why is Facebook paying so much for it? And why is it betting on...



from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/P6AzeE

Correction

Correction: In our Schumpeter column about the TED talks ("Ideas reinvenTED", March 15th we should have said that the initials stand for Technology, Entertainment and Design, not “Education”. Sorry, just our wishful thinking.

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/P6Ax6w

Correction

Correction: In last week’s newspaper we wrote that the Ambani family had invested $2 billion-3 billion in Indian gas pipelines ("Deep controversy, March 22nd). The correct figure is $4 billion. Apologies.

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1rFIfnz

The economy: On cloud nine trillion

SOME economic journalists are like stormbirds: they come alive when financial clouds gather and the thunder rolls. Your correspondent’s career has been different. He has migrated away from trouble, escaping crisis-struck Britain for booming India in 2007, then leaving that country before it sank into its sad, stagflationary funk. This will be his last week covering China’s economy—which is just as well, given the whiff of ozone in the air.This month China’s corporate-bond market suffered its first default since it began in its present form, a widely watched manufacturing index fell for the fifth month in a row, and officials in one eastern county rushed to placate worried depositors lining up to withdraw money from two small banks. It would seem a good time for a fair-weather bird to fly away.But China remains a resilient economy. It still has substantial room for error and a lot of room to grow. Although it is already a very big economy (its $9 trillion GDP is bigger than 154 other economies combined) it is not yet a very rich one. Its income per head (at market exchange rates) is only 13% of America’s and ranks below that of more than 80 other economies.Because...



from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1hejUR4

Pope: 'Bling Bishop' to resign

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a German bishop who was under investigation for spending $42 million on the renovation of his residence.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1o0CBNt

Why do poor people smoke more?

Megan Sandel and Renée Boynton-Jarrett say it's no wonder poor people smoke more. The stresses of living in poverty and Big Tobacco ad campaigns targeting their neighborhoods spur the habit.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1hxKfG3

The good news in Gwyneth's breakup

Breaking news: Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin have separated. S.E. Cupp says there's a message there.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1gtZ2FF

Adolfo Suárez: Spain’s democracy man

THE fact that Spain is now a pluralist democracy, and no longer a dictatorship, can be credited to several men. One is King Juan Carlos, who knew how to bide his time during Francoism’s death throes, when to emerge, and what sort of Spain he wanted. Another is Felipe González, the country’s first Socialist prime minister, who demonstrated that the left’s long period of wounded resentment after the civil war could be transmuted into a successful run in government. Yet another was Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, the king’s political mentor, who in 1975 pushed forward the name of an apparently mediocre provincial, Adolfo Suárez. And then, decidedly not least, Mr Suárez himself, who took on the task of thrusting Spain into democracy and did so at dizzying speed.Within a year of his appointment as Spain’s then-youngest prime minister, in July 1976 when he was 43, Mr Suárez had passed a law establishing a two-chamber Cortes and universal suffrage; had legalised the left-wing parties, including, most vitally, the communists; had declared an amnesty for political prisoners, legalised trade unions and dismantled most of Franco’s four-decade-old political machinery; had got his...



from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1g4flUF

Turkish officials block YouTube

Turkey has made the "administrative decision" to block access to YouTube, the semiofficial news agency Anadolu reported Thursday.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/NZueAT

Obama, Pope Francis meet for 1st time

They may not agree on abortion or contraception mandates, but President Obama and Pope Francis are aiming for common ground.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jxh6lr

Ebola virus spreading fast in Guinea

CNN's Vladimir Duthiers updates efforts to contain an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Guinea.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1o4qpv1

Roger Federer upset at Miami Masters

Kei Nishikori won a bruising three-hour contest against David Ferrer at the Miami Masters. He had plenty left in the tank, with the Japanese baseliner upsetting a surging Roger Federer a day later.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1o4qpeF

McVie to tour with Fleetwood Mac

Christine McVie hasn't ventured out on tour with Fleetwood Mac in 15 years, but she's ready to get back on the road.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/NZubVR

Stop the killing? Close the zoos

Nothing will change unless people stop visiting zoos, says campaigner.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1eTOjDf

How culling really saves animals

It is easy to criticize zoos and aquariums when healthy animals are culled, particularly when they are from endangered species. It's not always easy to understand the logic behind such a decision, but to get a picture of why good zoos take particular actions, one has to understand the context and the alternatives.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1g3taCY

Giraffe-euthanizing zoo kills lions

A Danish zoo that made international headlines last month when it killed a healthy giraffe is once again in the news after it killed four lions to make way for a new male.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1p4ykFS

S. Korea seizes North's fishing boat

A day after North Korea test-fired two missiles, South Korea captured a fishing boat from the North that had crossed into South Korean waters, officials say.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/P5NgGH

U.S. mudslide: Debris is 40 feet thick

A handful of people were miraculously pulled from the wreckage in Washington right after a mountain of mud rolled over two towns there Saturday. But no one has been found alive since, and the grim toll rises by the day.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1h8TQH2

Latest images give analysts hope

New satellite images showing 122 objects in the Indian Ocean may be the most significant discovery yet in the hunt for MH370.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1jGTuq3

Iran, Iran lead 2013 execution surge

Virtual "killing sprees" in Iran and Iraq led to a spike in the number of executions globally last year, according to Amnesty International, at odds with a steady decline in the use of the death penalty around the world over the last two decades.



from CNN.com - Top Stories http://ift.tt/1o3MlGC