Two prominent Western journalists have been killed in the Syrian city of Homs in the latest violence in the besieged city which left 20 people dead. Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, an American, and award-winning French photographer Remi Ochlik died when a shell hit a makeshift media centre in the Baba Amr district. Opposition-held areas of Homs have been besieged since 4 February. Thousands have died in unrest against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. More than 40 people died on Tuesday...

Google is currently making a pair of glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyes in real time.

At least four people have been killed and 20 injured in Afghanistan as protests spread over the burning of copies of the Koran at a US airbase. One person has been killed in Kabul, one in the eastern city of Jalalabad and two in Parwan province. US officials apologised on Tuesday after Korans were "inadvertently" put in an incinerator at Bagram airbase. Officials at Bagram reportedly believed Taliban prisoners were using the books to pass messages to each other. The charred remains of the volume...

Today’s Google Doodle barely resembles the usual company logo, as Google celebrates the 155th birthday of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. The name Hertz is today familiar to practically everyone who’s in contact with computer technology. The processors that power today’s computers, smartphones and tablets all have their heartbeat expressed in hertz (Hz), or – more likely – megahertz or gigahertz. Hertz is a SI unit of frequency which measures the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. Germ...

The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed above 13000 for the first time in almost four years, though it failed to hang onto the gains through the day's end.The Dow passed above 13000 a few times Tuesday, rising as high as 13005. It ended the day at 12965.69, up 15.82 points, or 0.1%. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index toyed with a milestone of its own, briefly surpassing its high reached last April before closing up 0.98 point, or 0.1%, at 1362.21. The advance came after a long weekend that s...

Did you just brave the lines of a midnight launch party and snag yourself a PS Vita in the US? Good news ye early adopters, Sony's PlayStation.Blog.US has just announced that select free apps will be available today as part of today's PlayStation Store update. Currently, you'll find Netflix, LiveTweet and Flickr, but there's still nary of trace of Facebook or Foursquare among the bunch (nor any official word on release dates for that matter). We gave each app a download and quick spin prior to t...

The founder of file-sharing site Megaupload has been granted bail by a New Zealand court. Kim Dotcom, 38, has been in prison since 20 January at the request of the US authorities. He faces charges in the US for one of the biggest copyright infringement cases in the country's history. The site is accused of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue. North Shore District Court Judge Nevin Dawson overturned two previous rulings that the millionaire, who is a German national,...

Some 49 people have been killed and at least 600 injured, officials say, in the worst train crash in Argentina in 40 years. The train hit the end of the platform at Once station in the capital Buenos Aires during the morning rush hour. "We assume that there was some fault in the brakes," Transportation Secretary JP Schiavi said. Dozens of people were trapped for hours in the wreckage but all have now been successfully taken to safety. "The train was full and the impact was tremendous," a passeng...

Some 49 people have been killed and at least 600 injured, officials say, in the worst train crash in Argentina in 40 years. The train hit the end of the platform at Once station in the capital Buenos Aires during the morning rush hour. "We assume that there was some fault in the brakes," Transportation Secretary JP Schiavi said. Dozens of people were trapped for hours in the wreckage but all have now been successfully taken to safety. "The train was full and the impact was tremendous," a passeng...

Marie Colvin, the award-winning Sunday Times journalist, has been killed in Syria. It is reported that she died alongside a French photographer in Homs when a house they were staying was shelled. News agencies say she and the photographer, Remi Ochlik, another veteran war correspondent, were killed by a rocket as they tried to make their escape. Colvin, who has worn a black eye patch since she lost an eye while working in Sri Lanka in 2001, was regarded as Britain's foremost front-line war repor...

With Ubuntu for Android, you can effectively carry a desktop computer inside your pocket. Image: CanonicalCramming a desktop environment onto a smartphone is a fun project that promises very little actual usefulness. Smartphone screens are too small for desktop OSes, and connecting a keyboard and mouse is usually out of the question. But now Canonical’s Ubuntu for Android takes a different approach, surfacing the desktop OS only when it actually makes sense.Canonical announced today that it will...

The end is nigh! For about 59 different Google ToS documents at least. After today, the new consolidated privacy policy will go into effect, which will also consolidate much of your data across Google's properties. That means this is your last chance to clear out El Goog's "you archives" before the great convergence of 2012. If you're not keen on Google sharing your information between its various products (though, you seemed to be okay with it being collected in the first place) today is the da...

Australia's Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has resigned amid widespread reports of a leadership tussle between him and Prime Minister Julia Gillard. He made the announcement at a press conference in Washington DC, where he had earlier met US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. There has been ongoing tension in the Labor Party in recent weeks over the leadership. Ms Gillard ousted Mr Rudd as prime minister in June 2010. "The simple truth is that I cannot continue to serve as foreign minister if I don...

Calling all supertaster space nerds: NASA wants your help to improve the bland food astronauts would have to eat while on a mission to Mars. The space agency is looking for applicants to eat astronaut food for four months during a simulated trip to the Red Planet. Participants will try instant foods, and ones with shelf-stable ingredients, and scientists will record their reactions. The goal of the experiment is to discover what foods people like to consume consistently. Cornell University and U...

Home prices fell to their lowest point in more than a decade in January, which helped to lift the pace of home sales, according to a report from an industry trade group.

It was true in January and a month later it's still true: your iPad was built in part by teenagers working 12-hour days for under $2 an hour. So was your iPhone, and in all likelihood, your Xbox, your Windows phone and other devices from likes of Dell, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard. On Tuesday, ABC's Nightline broadcast its tour of Foxconn, the Chinese contract manufacturer that reportedly builds 40 percent of the world's electronics. It accompanied Fair Labor Association inspectors on their fir...

As more women earn high-level corporate roles, more husbands are staying home, raising the kids, and changing the rules

Wired and GQ magazine publisher Condé Nast is amongst those now seeking a cost-effective cross-platform tablet production workflow for the blossoming number of new devices, after earlier implementing an iPad-specific strategy. The publisher pioneered tablet magazines when it built out an early iPad design on Adobe Digital Publishing Suite in 2010. But now Nook, Kindle Fire and multiple Android tablets and mobiles of various shapes, which would compel additional production investment, are requiri...

BAGRAM, Afghanistan — As thousands of angry Afghans flung rocks at NATO’s largest military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday, American officials sought to quell a widening furor over what they said was the accidental incineration by U.S. military personnel of copies of the Islamic holy book. The protests erupted early Tuesday after Afghans working at Bagram air base told local residents that a number of copies of the Koran had been burned. When they carried out the charred pages, waving them in the...

The Perfect Palette, a wedding blog that explores “the color palette possibilities for your wedding” and serves as a resource for other wedding ideas, would seem to be a perfect match for Pinterest, and it is. The site is far and away the biggest brand on Pinterest with more than 240,000 followers, according to Zoomsphere. The rest of the list illustrates that media titles that cater to the nesting instinct have a definite advantage. (As do publications that write about Pinterest, including Mash...