A Russian-crewed cargo ship that went missing for more than two weeks was hijacked by pirates, Russia's defense minister said Tuesday. "The hijackers boarded the Arctic Sea, threatened the crew with weapons and demanded that their orders be followed," Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov told President Dmitry Medvedev, according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. Russian authorities announced Tuesday that they had opened a criminal investigation on charges of "kidnapping by an organized group of people," the Prosecutor General's ...

Elders and religious leaders in southern Afghanistan are in talks with local Taliban leaders in an effort to reach a truce ahead of next week's election, a top Afghan official told CNN on Friday. Yet the Fastnet tragedy of 1979 in which 15 people were killed and ex-British leader Edward Heath went missing helped to usher in a new era of improved safety in the sport. It was 30 years ago today that a freak storm struck over 300 vessels ...

Prison authorities used to have almost complete control over an inmate's ability to communicate with the outside world. By checking their mail and parceling out telephone access — at scheduled times on easily and legally tapped landlines — communication for inmates was difficult and often expensive . Today, however, as cell phones proliferate , they are reaching into every corner of the planet — including jail cells. Authorities in India recently confiscated more than 600 cell phones in a ...

Investigators have located the body of a fourth victim in the wreckage of a helicopter that crashed after colliding with a plane over the Hudson River in New York, a source close to the investigation said. Rescue workers have not yet recovered the body, believed to be among nine victims of the collision, the source said late Saturday night. So far, only three bodies, including that of a child, have been recovered -- all of them from the Piper PA-32 ...

Apple is the exclusive gatekeeper to its iPhone App Store, able to reject apps at will -- as it did July 28 with Google Voice. But some developers aren't taking the rejection lying down: They're turning instead to an unauthorized app store called Cydia, where forbidden wares continue to exist -- and even earn developers some money. That store is operated by Jay Freeman, more fondly known in the iPhone "Jailbreak" community as Saurik. Only five months old, his ...

For all the relief over the jobless figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday morning — 247,000 jobs were lost in July, far fewer than economists had expected — a dark problem lurks in the numbers: dangerously high levels of long-term unemployment in America. Unlike recent recessions, the current economic crisis has been characterized by skyrocketing numbers of those out of work for three, six or more months at a time. Economists worry that the shock of the past year's financial crisis may ...

Jurors in the corruption trial of former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana ended their second day of deliberations without a verdict Friday, said a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, Virginia. A federal grand jury indicted Jefferson on on corruption charges June 4, 2007, about two years after federal agents said they found $90,000 in his freezer. Authorities said the cash was part of a payment in marked bills from an FBI informant in a transaction captured ...

For the voracious consumer of movies and TV shows old and new, the Netflix mail-order rental service is both useful and annoying. It is also addictive. I speak as a four-at-a-time subscriber who carefully manages and updates his queue of titles, closely monitors their return to the Netflix depot and waits anxiously for the postman to bring the next stash. Here, based on five months of obsessive use, of pleasure and frustration in roughly equal amounts, are five ways ...

In detective dramas, a dog's powerful sense of smell has become a predictable crime solver: the trusty canine takes a sniff of a suspect object and follows the scent, eventually coming to the perpetrator of the evil deed. But in real life, is this reliable evidence — or is it junk science that has helped put away innocent people? In mid-August, the Innocence Project of Texas plans to unveil a detailed study focusing primarily on the extensive work of ...

A new Taliban military "code of conduct" calls for restrictions on suicide attacks aimed at avoiding the killing of civilians, but U.S. and Afghan military officials dismissed the document as propaganda, calling it hypocritical. The booklet, obtained by CNN in northwestern Pakistan, has emerged during a crucial moment in the fight between troops and militants in Afghanistan, where battles are raging in the country's Helmand province and troops work to establish stability for the upcoming presidential elections. "Suicide attacks ...