Eyder Peralta

As the sun rose over South Africa on Friday, the country began to come to terms with the loss of Nelson Mandela, whom President Jacob Zuma called the father of the nation.

South Africans settled on the news with a mixture of "grief and joy," New York Times correspondent ...

He had a great vision. And despite naysayers, he stuck to his guns and eventually saw a hard-shell taco splattered with neon-orange cheese dust become a staple in the country's fast-food scene.

Todd Mills, the inspiration behind Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Tacos, died of cancer Thanksgiving morning.

He was 41.

Former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was not poisoned, French investigators have concluded.

After the results of the long-running investigation started to leak, Arafat's wife, Suha Arafat, told reporters in London that French scientists had ruled out the possibility that Arafat was poisoned with polonium-210.

Case settled? Not quite. This piece ...

Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro committed suicide by hanging himself, two independent corrections consultants said in a report released on Tuesday.

Before this report was released, a review by a state prisons agency had suggested that Castro died in September while performing autoerotic asphyxiation. That is likely not the case, Lindsay ...

Is a chimp, living as a pet in the home of Patrick and Diane Lavery in Gloversville, N.Y., really enslaved and entitled to his freedom? Does the 26-year-old Tommy, who scientists argue is cognitively similar to humans, deserve some of the same rights as Homo sapiens?

Those questions are at ...

Kicking off a weeklong trip to East Asia, Vice President Joe Biden urged China and Japan to put in place new mechanisms to reduce the chance of an escalation in tensions.

The two countries, as we've reported, are at odds over air space above a set of disputed islands ...

The mayor of Washington, D.C., whose tenure has been marked by a federal investigation into his 2010 campaign, will seek a second term.

Vincent Gray, a Democrat, walked into the office of the D.C. Board of Elections on Monday and signed up for nominating petitions. As the AP reports, ...

Perhaps George Takei introduced this viral video best. On Facebook he said it was one of those "What the Flock" moments.

The video shows hundreds of white geese hanging out in a field in Richmond, British Columbia near Vancouver. Eventually, as you might imagine, the geese take flight and ...

It seems Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee has given up on trying to make a point about the separation of church and state during the holiday season.

In a short statement issued on Monday, Chafee said the 18-foot blue spruce that will be raised inside the State House on ...

Early this morning, China successfully launched what it hopes will become its first rover mission on the moon, the official state news agency Xinhua reported.

The Chang'e-3 lunar probe was launched atop an enhanced Long March-3B rocket and is intended to be the first "soft landing" on the moon ...

Here's the best Black Friday story we missed: A Minn. man who was down on his luck, decided to spread some holiday cheer at the Mall of America on Friday by dropping 1,000 dollar bills from the fourth floor of the rotunda as a three-person choir sang Let It Snow.

The 100-day-old female panda cub at the National Zoo in Washington, now has a name: Bao Bao (宝宝) — meaning precious or treasure — was the most popular of the five names put up for a popular vote by Zoo.

The name was announced during a ceremony at the ...

Over at Sports Illustrated, Pete Thamel calls Auburn's victory over Alabama "the craziest finish in the history of college football."

That may have been the adrenaline speaking, but the upset was certainly stunning. Auburn was ranked No. 5 and the undefeated Alabama was ranked No. 1. Not only that ...

White House officials say the government's health insurance website, which has been plagued with problems ever since it launched in October, is now working smoothly for most users.

"The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity with greatly improved performance," Jeffrey Zients, the president's appointee to fix ...

(This post was last updated at 5:02 p.m. ET.)

A Metro-North commuter train derailed on Sunday in the Bronx borough of New York City, killing four passengers, and injuring 63.

WABC-TV in New York reports the train derailed at about 7:20 a.m., while navigating a curve just outside the ...

Paul Walker, the star of the stunningly successful The Fast and the Furious film franchise, was killed in a car accident on Saturday, the actor's representative told the AP.

On Walker's Facebook page, his team explained that he was a passenger in a friend's car and that he ...

Paul Crouch, who along with his wife Jan, founded a TV network that went on to become the largest Christian television network in the world, died on Saturday, the network announced.

Trinity Broadcasting Network said it is believed that he died from on-going heart problems. He was 79.

If ...

While saying that it is still "deeply concerned" by China's broadening of its air defense zone, the U.S. State Department urged commercial airlines to abide by the new zone and give Chinese authorities advance notice if they planned to fly over a set of disputed islands in the East China ...

Swiss voters rejected a measure on Sunday that would have capped executive pay to no more than 12 times that of the company's lowest paid worker.

As NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reported, the ballot initiative was driven by the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party, which said that CEO ...

In a move that angered Japan, China expanded its air defense zone to include a group of uninhabited islands claimed by both countries.

The Chinese government released a map and coordinates on Saturday that show the zone covers most of the East China Sea, including the islands.

"The Chinese ...