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 ...

CIA interrogators threatened an al Qaeda prisoner with a gun and an electric drill to try to scare him into giving up information, according to a long-concealed inspector-general's report due to be made public on Monday, sources familiar with the report confirmed to CNN. The gun and drill were used in two separate interrogation sessions against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, one of the sources said. Al-Nashiri is accused of plotting the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which left 17 U.S. ...

Fore! Look out, because after having several secret and low-key rendezvous, LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian emerged for a very public golf date Thursday. It's a weekly tradition for Rimes to hit the links, and around 1 p.m. she arrived at the Valencia Country Club -- shortly after her surprise partner for the afternoon. "Eddie arrived at the private country club in his Porsche a few minutes before LeAnn," said an eyewitness. "LeAnn was beaming when she saw Eddie ...

Zieba Shorish-Shamley's Afghanistan doesn't exist anymore. The tea and fresh fruit her Muslim family shared over laughter with their Jewish friends at home. The female lawmakers who spoke out in Afghanistan's parliament. The tourists who were so enchanted by Kabul, the country's cosmopolitan capital, they called it the "Paris of Central Asia." When the Afghan native recently returned home, all of those childhood memories seemed like a mirage. What she saw instead was what many Americans now associate with Afghanistan: ...

Air China, the country's flag carrier, has agreed to pay HK$6.3bn (US$813m) to increase its stake in Cathay Pacific, only three years after first securing a holding in the Hong Kong airline. Chavez's government is "moving forcefully to silence critics," said the unclassified U.S. analysis prepared by the Open Source Center, a government intelligence center. The relationship between privately owned media in Venezuela and the leftist Chavez have never been rosy. Chavez has accused private television stations of supporting his ...

Authorities have fired and arrested the chief of an Iranian jail that was closed amid allegations of mistreatment of detainees held for protesting June's disputed election, Iranian media reported Sunday. "One security official at the prison, who was responsible for reporting irregularities at the prison, as well as the prison warden have been sacked and are under arrest," Gen. Esmaeel Ahmadi Moghadam, commander of Iran's security forces, told the semi-official Iran Student's News Agency. Iran's Press TV said the move ...

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 ...

Hackers slowed Twitter to a standstill early on Aug. 6, frustrating millions of users. For the culprits, all it took to snarl the popular social-networking site was one of the oldest tools in the Internet hacker handbook: the Distributed Denial-of-Service attack , a method that has been used in the past to crash some of the Web's largest sites, including Yahoo! to CNN. DDoS attacks are surprisingly low tech. Using a network of computers controlled by a single ...

Two Russian attack submarines have been cruising in the Atlantic off the East Coast of the United States, a senior defense official said Wednesday. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said their presence is not causing alarms to go off. "So long as they are operating in international waters, as, frankly, we do around the world, and are behaving in a responsible way, they are certainly free to do so, and it doesn't cause any alarm within this building," he said. The ...

Two days before leaving Tehran and three weeks after Iranian Intelligence had come around looking for me, I was taking no chances. The notes, essays and photos on the protests I had been regularly sending back for publication would have to be sent to the States separately...with my grandma. She had a flight to the U.S. one month after mine and although the training manuals at Langley likely do not recommend it, I spent the better part of ...