Complete this sentence: In the event of a loss of cabin pressure ... If you guessed, "oxygen masks will drop from above," you are not alone. Because the federally mandated preflight safety announcement is about as well known as the pledge of allegiance to many travelers, they immediately tune it out. So airlines are getting creative to grab passengers' attention. According to a 2001 National Transportation Safety Board study, 69 percent of passengers who completed the survey did not watch ...

If you are behind the wheel of your car, someone may be on to you. More and more cities are equipping patrolmen, toll booths and even access roads with computer sidekicks that can keep track of vehicle movements; but by doing so, they are not only changing the face of 21st century law enforcement but sparking debate over privacy issues. Automated license plate recognition systems mounted in patrol cars, are capable of processing 1,500 license plates a ...

Federal authorities are searching for an eighth alleged member of a North Carolina group that authorities say plotted "violent jihad" overseas, prosecutors said Tuesday. Robin Zier of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh told CNN that the eighth person, whose name has been redacted from court documents, is a U.S. citizen. She added that U.S. Attorney George Holding had said federal authorities hoped to have the person apprehended soon, and the public should not be worried. The U.S. Attorney's Office ...

For Morris Murenzi, a visit to his native Rwanda always includes attending a gacaca court -- a local tribunal of villagers set up to try suspects in a 1994 genocide that killed 800,000. At the proceedings, he sits with his countrymen. Some tearfully confront their attackers and testify against them, their scars from the genocide still visible. Others -- like him -- quietly listen, their emotional scars invisible. They wait and hope for answers about how their relatives died as ...

Gen. Nadeem Ahmad swirls the helicopter over Pakistan's ground zero. Below is the Swat Valley of North West Frontier Province. From the air, the valley in the foothills of the Hindu Kush looks undisturbed. Green fields amid clusters of drab houses. A closer look at Swat reveals how well the Pakistani Army fared in its military campaign to wipe out the militants. The cost of success: massive destruction that is sure to hamper the lives of already suffering residents just ...

Tendai Biti is Zimbabwe's outspoken finance minister and MDC party Secretary General. The 44-year-old lawyer has openly criticized president Mugabe and his government, but was the main negotiator in forging a coalition government. As well as working with his political enemy, he now has the daunting task of rebuilding a collapsed economy that had an inflation rate of 500 billion percent in December 2008 and and unemployment at 95 percent. The global software firm has created an online tool ...

David and Jerry. Larry and Sergey. It's like a Jeopardy! category: Guys Who Created Fortune 500 Tech Companies While at Stanford University. Could Kayvon and Aaron be the next power dudes to join that group Best friends from boyhood, now sophomores at Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., Kayvon Beykpour and Aaron Wasserman, along with a group of five other friends, have built a free application for the iPhone that has the academic world buzzing. So far, their program, "iStanford," which ...

The recent hacking of a Twitter employee's personal e-mail account is raising questions about the security of storing personal information and business data on the Internet. The Web has been buzzing since a hacker allegedly broke into a Twitter administrator's personal e-mail account about a month ago and used that information to access the employee's Google Apps account. That account housed some of Twitter's private financial documents and notes, according to Twitter's official blog. Some of those documents circulated the ...

A chemical plant explosion early Wednesday in Luoyang, China, killed a factory worker and hospitalized 108 others, seven of them seriously, state-run media said. The U.S. Navy tailed a North Korean ship that was believed to have been carrying weapons bound for Myanmar. Diplomats bemoaned the state's reluctance to return to the negotiating table even as the regime in Pyongyang celebrated American Independence Day by lobbing seven short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan. But a worldwide network of amateur ...

Federal agents found much of the information produced by the Bush administration's top-secret warrantless surveillance program vague and difficult to use, a sweeping review of the program found. Then-President George Bush and other top administration officials have said the program was a critical tool in preventing terrorist attacks. However, a report Friday by the inspectors general of the CIA, the Justice Department, the Pentagon and other agencies found that some FBI and CIA agents were frustrated by the secrecy surrounding ...