The new horror movie "Paranormal Activity" could be filling movie studio marketing departments with fear. Using a campaign of limited showings, social media and word-of-mouth fan buzz, the film has managed to become a breakout hit without the aid of a glitzy marketing campaign -- or even a traditional movie trailer. According to Variety, the very low-budget film (it reportedly cost $11,000), which played in fewer than 200 theaters, raked in $7.1 million over the weekend -- a record for ...

When Ken Umeano went to watch the summer sci-fi blockbuster "District 9," he stormed out after 30 minutes. "I was so angry," said Umeano, a Nigeria native living in Atlanta. "They were showing Nigerians as corrupt, eating aliens, saying they have sex with aliens. I could not watch that." The movie set in South Africa is a story about an alien space ship that breaks down over Johannesburg -- leaving the stranded creatures in a fierce battle with humans. In ...

Customers of the printing company knew her as "Allissa." They spoke to her about graphic design, business cards and fliers, and describe her as professional, polite and responsive. "She was always good at getting us what we wanted," said Ben Daughdrill, who used to own a junk hauling business. "You got the feeling she was doing all the work." But "Allissa," authorities say, was really Jaycee Dugard, kidnapped 18 years ago from her home in South Lake Tahoe, California. ...

The 54-year reign of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is expected to come to an end on Sunday in the country's first general election in four years. The main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan , has little experience leading on a national level, but there are strong indications that voters will overwhelmingly support the party and its ambitious platform of reforming Japan's broken system. After half a century Japan, it seems, is finally clamoring for change. The ...

A Dutch court placed a 13-year-old girl into temporary custody on Friday after her parents insisted on supporting her bid to become the youngest person to sail around the world solo. Laura Dekker, an avid sailor who was reportedly born on a yacht during her parents' own round-the-world trip, told Dutch television before the court handed down its decision that she simply wanted to "learn about the world and to live freely." "The crucial question is whether ...

Thumbing through his local Swedish newspaper, Göteborg resident Mattias Akerberg found himself troubled by a full-page advertisement for Ikea. It wasn't that the Grevbäck bookcases looked any less sturdy, or that the Bibbi Snur duvet covers were any less colorful, or even that the names given to each of the company's 9,500 products were any less whimsical. No, what bothered Akerberg was the typeface. "I thought that something had gone terribly wrong, but when I Twittered about it, ...

The central theme marking this weekend's general election in Japan is much like the one that dominated the U.S. presidential contest a year ago: change. Yukio Hatoyama, president of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan , is striving to paint his party as the party of change on the campaign trail, much like U.S. President Barack Obama positioned his Democrats. And if the election goes as expected — the DPJ commands a comfortable lead in polls over the ruling ...

Humankind doesn't have a great track record when it comes to cleaning up environmental messes, but there was one time we really outdid ourselves. That was back in 1989, when over 190 nations signed the Montreal Protocol, phasing out the use of chlorofluorocarbons . The decade before, scientists had discovered that CFCs were blowing a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, exposing us to dangerous ultraviolet radiation and boosting the risk of skin cancer. Today, CFCs are no ...

You've probably heard the bad news about homework: kids are working longer hours than ever before, and it's driving them nearly insane. At least one major book has made this argument, as have numerous news articles like this one and this one. But now a research team at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln has come forward with a new study reporting that most parents actually don't find their children's homework loads to be monstrous. In fact, according to the ...

It's the world's longest poem — over 1.8 million words, containing over one hundred thousand verses and approximately ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. And now India's celebrated epic the Mahabharata, the writing of which began around 300 B. C. by the venerated Hindu figure Vyasa, is being written again — one 140-character tweet at a time. Chindu Sreedharan, 36, lecturer in Journalism and Communication at the Media School ...