Google is facing legal action over its decision to not label the body of water separating Iran and neighbouring Arab Gulf states on its online map service.

The Iranians call the waterway the Persian Gulf, while Arab countries often refer to it as the Arabian Gulf.

Iran has warned Google it will face "serious damages" if it does not denote the area as the Persian Gulf.

(New York) – The long awaited national prison rape elimination standards issued on May 17, 2012 by the Justice Department, if fully implemented, may end widespread prison rape in the United States, Human Rights Watch said today. The standards provide detailed guidance to federal, state, and local officials on how to prevent, detect, and respond to sexual abuse in their confinement facilities.

Facebook Inc took eight years to stage one of the most anticipated initial public offerings ever. The anticlimax came Friday, as Wall Street bankers struggled to prevent the newly minted stock from ending its first day with a loss. The stock had been widely predicted to soar on its first day. Instead, up until the closing moments of the trading session, Facebook's underwriters battled to keep the stock from slipping below its offering price of $38 a share. Such a stumble would have been a ...

Eyewitness News spoke with the coordinator of the group Houston Ministers Against Crimes and he says it's situations like the Chad Holley case why they are no longer working with the Houston Police Department.

"This is their rule book. They took our group, the Houston Ministers Against Crime, and changed it to PACA (Police and Clergy Alliance)," said the Rev. Robert Jefferson with the Cullen Missionary Baptist Church.

Using a technique similar to pointillism, multimedia artist/YouTube sensation Phil Hansen transforms banana skins into his canvases, recreating some of art history’s most famous works with a push pin. As the fruit naturally browns, his designs magically appear. Crazy, right? Hansen has a book on the project due out next month, Tattoo a Banana: And Other Ways to Turn Anything and Everything Into Art, but in the meantime, click through to check out more of his work, as well as a fascinating ...

The tale has taken on mythic proportions in China, tainting one of the country’s most ambitious leaders and adding fuel to a scandal that is still unfolding in the halls of power here.

It goes like this: Bo Guagua, the younger son of the leader, Bo Xilai, arrived one evening last spring at the home of the United States ambassador to pick up one of the ambassador’s daughters for a dinner date. He was supposedly wearing a tuxedo and driving a red Ferrari, an emblem of the privileged lives ...

The New York Post’s tender-hearted angel of mercy, Andrea Peyser, is best known for the deeply humanistic perspective with which she handles the sensitive criminal proceedings of our legal system. Less well appreciated is her concern for the good physical hygiene of those society has cast aside.

President Joyce Banda has said she wants Malawi to overturn its ban on homosexual acts - the first African country to do so since 1994.

Two Malawian men were sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2010 after saying they were getting married.

Several Western leaders have recently said they would cut aid to countries which did not recognise gay rights.

Mrs Banda took power last month after her predecessor, Bingu wa Mutharika, died of a heart attack.

She has since reversed several of his policies, ...

Residents of the isolated Mosquito Coast of Honduras have burned down government buildings and are demanding that American drug agents leave the area immediately, intensifying a dispute over whether an antidrug operation there last week left four innocent people dead, including two pregnant women.

A coalition of nurses’ unions is calling for a “Robin Hood” tax on Wall Street, which they say could generate up to $350 billion a year, in the first major protest ahead of this weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago.

Their pitch: impose a tax of 50 cents on every $100 of trades of stocks, bonds, dividends and other financial transactions, which are not currently taxed. The U.S. would join more than a dozen other nations that already have a financial transaction tax, according to National ...

Several gay rights activists have suffered injuries after being assaulted during and after a chaotic demonstration in St.Petersburg

Dozens gathered in a city center park to mark International Day Against Homophobia. City authorities had sanctioned the demonstration, and a police unit shielded participants as they chanted slogans and gave out balloons to passers-by.

A larger crowd of anti-gay protesters, some wielding Orthodox crosses, repeatedly shouted death threats, and attempted to break ...

Citi Field, home of the Mets, is sold out for Sunday evening — but not for a baseball game. More than 40,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews plan to pack the stadium to hear about what the event’s organizers call the dangers of the Internet and how to use it in a religiously responsible way.

Tickets for the gathering have been so sought after that organizers announced on Wednesday that they had also rented the nearby 20,000-seat Arthur Ashe Stadium, home to the United States Open, for an overflow ...

Some species of cephalopods are incapable of concealing their sexual history. The males produce packets of sperm called spermatangia that they grasp with a specialized arm that they then reach out and splat, poke into their mate. In Octopoteuthis deletron, a deep-sea squid, these spermatangia are large, pale, and distinctive, so every time a squid is mated it's left with a little white dangling flag marking it — so sex is like a combination of tag and paintball. The males are loaded with ammo ...

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- A second-grader at Meridian Ranch Elementary school in Colorado Springs was pulled out of class on Wednesday for painting his face black.

Sean King dressed up as Martin Luther King, Jr. for a class project.

Scientists remained puzzled Friday over what caused rocks picked up on San Onofre State Beach to ignite in the pocket of a woman's cargo shorts.

The 44-year-old San Clemente woman, who has not been identified, went to the beach Saturday with her family, and her children collected colored rocks. The woman took the rocks from her children, put them in her right pocket, and the stones ignited after they returned home, authorities said.

Capt. Marc Stone of the Orange County Fire Authority said ...

Chicago police have reportedly engaged in a preemptive raid against activists that planned to protest the NATO summit. The raid is believed to have taken place late last night in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago.

... But tonight he achieved something I've never, ever seen before with his free and outdoor performance of Miraculous Mandarin, a Bela Bartok ballet that Byrd has updated to be about modern-day drug dealers and a woman caught in the middle of their cash and dope and violence.

Byrd—and his Spectrum Dance Theater—performed it in a vacant space in a building in the International District, with viewers standing outside in the rain in Hing Hay park, watching it through the windows. We can ...

In 1991, Acton & Dystel promoted Obama as the author of the never-produced “Journeys in Black and White” by declaring Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

Twelve years later, however, the Dystel of Acton & Dystel was busy promoting Obama’s new book, “Dreams from My Father,” and still touting the author as “born in Kenya.”

Through the Internet archive Wayback Machine, WND found an August 2003 listing of Dystel & Goderich’s author bios, including the ...

The National Journal alleged we had censored a talk because we considered the issue of inequality "too hot to handle." The story ignited a firestorm of outrage on Reddit, Huffington Post and elsewhere. We were accused of being cowards. We were in the pay of our corporate partners. We were the despicable puppets of the Republican party.

Here's what actually happened.

A Chinese writer is claiming that Rupert Murdoch was behind one of the Wall Street Journal's more embarrassing recent corrections—the paper wrongly claimed that the son of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai, who preached Maoist austerity, once showed up for a date at former Amb. Jon Huntsman's residence in a cherry-red Ferrari—and that the Journal "badgered" and "threatened" a source that refused to back it up on the story. The Journal's China editor tells Gawker that the claims are ...