Nokia has pledged to strike back at Apple and produce mobile phones that will compete effectively with the U.S. technology company's iPhone. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, said that it was aiming to be "even more competitive" following criticism that it had failed to come up with a handset to match the iPhone. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Kallasvuo also insisted that Nokia would succeed with its strategy of transforming ...

Brad Pitt gets top billing in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," but Austrian actor Christoph Waltz may have turned in the most memorable performance as a Nazi "Jew Hunter." Waltz, a 52-year-old veteran of German television, was hardly known outside of Europe, until now. Tarantino, insisting on actors with geographic origins similar to their characters, chose Waltz to play a complex and unforgettable villain: Nazi Col. Hans Landa. Landa mixes charm, humor and intelligence with great cruelty and opportunism ...

Ben Huh is the first to admit his company could easily have wound up on FAIL Blog. For the uninitiated, that's his wildly popular website to which users submit photos and videos documenting such colossally stupid moves as writing a billboard partly in Braille and using a trash can as a bike helmet. Like the rest of the 20-odd websites Huh owns, FAIL Blog was added to his empire for no more specific reason, he says, than "Dude, I ...

Making a living as an architect has never been an easy proposition. Very expensive schooling is generally followed by years of laboring under another architect for slave wages — all in the hopes that, one day, a devastatingly rich patron will fund the building of their dreams. But with the economy grinding along in second gear, billings have plummeted and even prominent designers, from Frank Gehry to Norman Foster, have been forced to downsize staff and shut down offices ...

In an era when millions of Americans are chained to computers, handcuffed to BlackBerrys and plugged into iPods, something as simple as knowing the current time should be easy. But here's the snag: none of these devices ever seem to sync up with each other. Why is accurately keeping time so tricky? There is an official U.S. time, determined concurrently by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory. Both operate atomic clocks, which ...

Just a few months before John Gottman, a leading American marriage researcher and psychologist, was to be married, his father died, leaving Gottman to contend with overwhelming loss during what should have been one of the happiest times of his life. No one would have blamed him for putting the wedding on hold. But in the end, Gottman says, the strain of dealing with his grief made him that much more devoted to his future bride. "My wife helped ...

First-time visitors to this hamlet on the Nam Song River can be forgiven for feeling a little lost. With shirtless young backpackers drinking beer and sun tanning, it looks more like an Ibizan beach town than a Laotian village. But, no, you didn't take a wrong turn at the Thai border. This is Vang Vieng — farm town turned full-moon party, smack in the middle of a communist state. Once a resting place for opium-addled sojourners on sweet, slow ...

The new Judd Apatow movie carried the perky title Funny People, but audiences quickly figured out it should really be called The Guy Who Thinks He's Gonna Die and Isn't Very Nice. Or Funny. It managed a decent $8.7 million on opening day, dropped 15% on Saturday and is expected to finish the weekend at $23.4 million. The good news for Apatow and his long-ago roomie Adam Sandler is that their film topped the weekend box office at domestic ...

You've heard the propaganda: Zombies Are the New Vampires. Once relegated to back-list B movies like I Walked With a Zombie and Night of the Living Dead, those slow-moving, post-mortem drudges of West African mythic origin are now the hot horror creature. The PR is positively zombastic. They have their own anthem — Zombies Are the New Black, by the Philly pop-punk sextet The Wonder Years — and their own music video, which you may have seen in ...

If you'd like to get a sense of how we're emerging from our nationwide housing malaise, sit down at Jillian and Aaron Roberts' kitchen table. As 2-year-old twins Lennon and Miles run by — those divots in the table are their doing — the couple explain that when they first started looking to become homeowners back in 2006, there was little they could afford. "Even a modest home was too much for us," says Jillian, recalling the go-go years ...