Residents and police try to rescue refugees from a boat being smashed by violent seas against the jagged coastline of Australia's Christmas Island on Wednesday. Dozens of people are feared to have drowned after a boat carrying suspected asylum seekers crashed into rocks on Australia’s Christmas Island. Pictures from the scene showed the boat, believed to be carrying Iranians and Iraqis, smashed... 

On the heels of World AIDS Day comes a stunning medical breakthrough: Doctors believe an HIV-positive man who underwent a stem cell transplant has been cured as a result of the procedure. Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the “Berlin Patient,” received the transplant in 2007 as part of a lengthy treatment course for leukemia. His doctors recently published a report in the journal Blood... 

Taimour Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly, the Stockholm bomber was once a fun-loving party guy, said friends and family. He even had an Israeli girlfriend. An internet posting on Monday, attributed to a senior al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, warned that last weekend’s deadly bombings in Stockholm were “only the beginning”, and threatened attacks against Nato and Europe. In an audio recording on the... 

A federal judge ruled that a central plank of the health law-the requirement that most Americans carry insurance-violates the Constitution, dealing the biggest setback yet to the Obama administration's signature legislative accomplishment. A federal court ruled Monday that a key part of the health-care overhaul violates the Constitution, dealing the first legal setback to the Obama administration’s... 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel. German leader Angela Merkel on Wednesday brushed off reports in secret U.S. diplomatic cables that describe her as the “Teflon” chancellor as mere party chatter. Most of what is said about Germany in the leaked U.S. Embassy cables released by the WikiLeaks website “is part of every better party and therefore we weren’t all that excited,” Ms. Merkel told journalists. The... 

Sweden withholding documentation on Assange probe: lawyer One of the two Swedish women who have filed sex complaints against the founder of WikiLeaks has reportedly left Sweden and may no longer be cooperating with the criminal investigation. According to a report at Australian news site Crikey.com, Anna Ardin has moved to the Palestinian territories to volunteer with a Christian group working to... 

China is shifting its space program into high gear, with recently announced goals to build a manned space station by 2020 and send a spacecraft to Mars by 2013 — all on the heels of its second robotic moon mission this year. Yet some space analysts worry that China’s ascendancy in space means the waning of American superiority in spaceflight. The United States is retiring its storied space... 

There’s been no shortage of outrage over the TSA’s “naked” body scanners, which have been compared to virtual strip searches. For those of you who want to protect your private parts from being ogled by TSA employees, crowdsourced online retail site Betabrand is now offering a scanner-proof undergarment, aptly called “Privates”. The brainchild of Stephen Russell, the founder and chairman... 

This winter is poised to bring a chilling surge in death rates as Britain braces for an Arctic blast, with temperatures rivalling Siberia and the coldest conditions in a century. Experts are forecasting a significant rise in cold-related fatalities, estimating a staggering 12 deaths every hour during the harshest winter in recent memory. As the bitter cold sets in, concerns about a potential death... 

North Korea has warned that US-South Korean cooperation could bring a nuclear war to the region, as the South began artillery drills amid lingering tension nearly three weeks after the North’s deadly shelling of a South Korean island. The South’s naval live-fire drills are scheduled to run Monday through Friday at 27 sites. The regularly scheduled exercises are getting special attention... 

The House of Representatives earlier this week approved a significant increase in the level of military aid to Israel, pushing the level to $3 billion in flat military aid, with an additional $205 million set aside for a short range rocket system. Both of the increases were already planned as part of a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel, but were formally approved as... 

Russia delivered at least 1,800 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles to Venezuela in 2009, U.N. arms control data show, despite vigorous U.S. efforts to stop President Hugo Chavez’s stridently anti-American government from acquiring the weapons. The United States feared that the missiles could be funneled to Marxist guerrillas fighting Colombia’s pro-American government or Mexican drug... 

A large section of Australian MPs are enraged at the treatment of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is facing a revolt from several MPs in her left-wing parliamentary faction, who are enraged at the treatment of Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblower website ‘Wikileaks’ that is releasing over 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables. According to... 

Update January 12, 2011: First WikiLeaks’ Cable Mentioning UFOs Released A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared for President Medvedev by Russian Space Forces (VKS) 45th Division of Space Control says that an upcoming WikiLeaks release of secret US cables details that the Americans have been “engaged” since 2004 in a “war” against UFO’s based on or near the Continent... 

More than 50% of Americans say they are worse off now under Obama. According to a new Bloomberg poll, a majority of Americans believes that they are worse off, today, under Obama than they were two years ago, when Obama had just been elected. Giving the president another headache that is sure to compound his political problems is the number of Americans who responded that they thought the US was...