WASHINGTON (Yonhap News) – The United States has the capability to intercept ballistic missiles from North Korea, a senior U.S. official has said.Patrick O'Reilly, director of the Missile Defense Agency, made the remarks at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday in response to a lawmaker who expressed "concerns about the ground-based midcourse defense system in Alaska and California," c

JERUSALEM (AP) – Israeli aircraft killed three Palestinian militants who were planning to abduct Israelis over the upcoming Jewish festival of Passover, the military said early Saturday.An Israeli military spokeswoman said that an ``aircraft had fired at a terror squad of the terror group Hamas that was planning to carry out kidnappings.'' She said the group was plotting the attacks for the Jewish

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Japan's unfolding nuclear disaster is "much bigger than Chernobyl" and could rewrite the international scale used to measure the severity of atomic accidents, a Russian expert said here Friday."Chernobyl was a dirty bomb explosion. The next dirty bomb is Fukushima and it will cost much more" in economic and human terms, said Natalia Mironova, a thermodynamic engineer who became

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Facebook and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg have been hit with a lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion in damages over a page on the social network which called for a "Third Intifada" against Israel.Facebook this week shut down the "Third Intifada" page, which had almost 500,000 fans, but the lawsuit filed in a court here claims that the social network showed "negligence" by not quic

DAMASCUS (AFP) ― Syrian authorities Thursday announced a raft of measures aimed at meeting protesters’ demands as opposition movements ready for more rallies across the country after Friday Muslim prayers.“Our date is Friday, from all houses, all places of worship, every citizen and every free man, to all squares, for a free Syria,” said a statement posted Thursday on Facebook group The Syria Revo

KUWAIT CITY (AFP) ― The ruler of the Gulf state of Kuwait on Thursday issued a decree accepting the resignation of the cabinet which quit earlier in the day, plunging the oil-rich emirate into a fresh political crisis.The decree, cited by the official news agency KUNA, asked Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammad al-Ahamd Al-Sabah and other ministers to continue as a caretaker government until a ne

DUBLIN (AFP) ― Ireland’s central bank on Thursday ordered a drastic overhaul of the eurozone nation’s stricken banking sector as the cost of bailing out its lenders was set to top 70 billion euros ($99 billion).The Central Bank of Ireland said in a statement that four lenders needed to raise an extra 24 billion euros after it carried out vital stress tests on their ability to withstand another fin

Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, had its debt rating cut for the first time by Standard & Poor’s, which cited market share losses and “weaker” operating margins at the Finnish company.The long-term rating was lowered one step to “A-” with a stable outlook, S&P said in a statement Wednesday. S&P has since June 1998 ranked the debt “A,” the sixth-highest of 10 investment grades

Toyota Motor Corp. may delay the production of at least 500,000 vehicles in Japan because of a shortage of parts and electricity after the nation’s record earthquake, said an analyst at Advanced Research Japan.Toyota’s operating profit may be hurt by at least 100 billion yen ($1.2 billion) in the fiscal year ending Thursday and up to 200 billion yen next fiscal year, said Koji Endo, an auto analys

Japan is considering pouring concrete into its crippled Fukushima atomic plant as the United Nation’s nuclear watchdog agency warned that a potential uncontrolled chain reaction could cause further radiation leaks.Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano Wednesday ruled out the possibility that the two undamaged reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s six-unit Daiichi plant would be salvaged. Units 1 th