This hasn’t, on the whole, been a great era for action heroes. Sure, we’ve got cops and spies and superheroes and gods and titans crawling out of every corner of the cineplex. But can you even remember the name of the guy who plays John Carter? Which is in theaters right now?

The movie industry has been trying to revive the Golden Age of Action since its ’80s heyday, with little success. Alex Pettyfer, Taylor Lautner, Jason Momoa, Justin Timberlake, and “John Carter’s” Taylor Kitsch are among those who’ve failed in the last year alone.

Jason Statham comes closest to replicating Bruce Willis’ deadpan swagger, while The Rock had potential, until he donned a tutu for “Tooth Fairy.” But even once-unassailable stars like Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger have to band together — as they will in this summer's “The Expendables 2” — to make any sort of impression.

And when they do, will it compare with the impact we’re about to see from a 21-year-old woman? Because this year’s biggest action hero is very likely to be “The Hunger Games’” Jennifer Lawrence.

As Katniss Everdeen, Lawrence brings us a warrior tougher than any in recent memory. At just 16, she single-handedly supports her family. Stares down death on a tragically regular basis. Insists, despite intense opposition, on remaining the master of her own fate. And is far more likely to save boys than swoon over them. (Though “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” are often compared, the self-reliant Katniss has little in common with the oft-rescued Bella, a character perpetually defined by her relationships.)

Granted, plenty of ladies have used brute force to break down barriers onscreen. Pam Grier had the ’70s covered, in films like “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown.” Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton will remain eternally iconic for their “Alien” and “Terminator” roles, and Carrie-Anne Moss set the standard for “Matrix” fans before co-star Keanu Reeves even showed up.

For the most part, though, women wielded weapons because men told them to (“La Femme Nikita”) or they looked great in leather (pick a “Batman” sequel) or both (“Charlie’s Angels”)

So, there you have it, "Mad Men" fans -- we finally know the status of Don Draper's relationship with Megan.

(Warning: If you haven't watched the "Mad Men" Season 5 premiere yet, stop right here or risk being spoiled.)

In tonight's long-awaited Season 5 premiere (read Mo Ryan's full recap here), we found out that Don actually married his new Mrs. Draper, Megan (Jessica Pare). The two are living it up in their swanky Manhattan party pad -- Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo! -- and, of course, she's been promoted from front desk receptionist to copywriter at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

But how will their marriage affect Megan's relationship with Don and Betty's three children? After such a fun trip to L.A. together, is the Megan-Sally friendship kaput? It's hard to tell in the premiere, with the "new" Draper family chatting over breakfast ... Sally seems happy, but you never know with that little emotional timebomb.

I caught up with Sally Draper herself, actress Kiernan Shipka (read part 1 of our chat here), to find out her reaction when she learned about the changes this season, and how Sally is coping with it. Could Sally and Megan really "become best buds this season," like she teases? Only time will tell ...

What was your reaction when you read the first script and realized that Don and Megan had actually gotten married?
I was happy and I was excited, but I was kind of surprised ... a lot went through my head.

Well, of all the kids, I feel like Sally would be happiest to have a young, fun new stepmom ... but she'd also be affected the most.
Definitely. I mean, we saw how she didn't like Faye last season, so ... [Laughs.] Who knows how she's gonna like Megan as her dad's wife?

In that scene where they're all having breakfast together in Don and Megan's new place, you can't really tell what Sally's thinking. Can you give us some insight into the new dynamic and how Sally feels about it all?
I think, to be honest, she's just kind of adjusting to the new dynamic. She's kind of coping with what's going on.

Shaima Alawadi's 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious on the dining room floor of her home Wednesday. She was taken to the hospital and put on life support, but she was taken off life around 3 p.m. Saturday.

"Our understanding is that she was beaten and she was hit with some kind of a tool about 8 times in the head. She was knocked on the floor and was found in a pool of blood," said Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Alawadi was a 32-year-old mother of five children, ranging in age from eight to 17.

"A week ago they left a letter saying this is our country not yours you terrorist, and so my mom ignored that thinking it was just kids playing a prank," Alawadi's daughter, Fatima Al Himidi, told ABC News affiliate KGTV. "But the day they hit her, they left another note again, and it said the same thing."

Al Himidi told KGTV the intruders did not steal anything from their home, and the only motive must have been hate.

"A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that," Lt. Mark Coit said, according to The Associated Press. "We don't want to focus on only one issue and miss something else."

Al Awadi immigrated to the United States from Iraq in the mid-1990s.

Reaching bottom after a 2-hour-and-36-minute descent, the National Geographic explorer and filmmaker typed out welcome words for the cheering support crew waiting at the surface: "All systems OK."

Folded into a sub cockpit as cramped as any Apollo capsule, the National Geographic explorer and frilmmaker is now investigating a seascape more alien to humans than the moon. Cameron is only the third person to reach this Pacific Ocean valley southwest of Guam (map)—and the only one to do so solo.

Hovering in what he's called a vertical torpedo, Cameron is likely collecting data, specimens, and imagery unthinkable in 1960, when the only other explorers to reach Challenger Deep returned after seeing little more than the silt stirred up by their bathyscaphe.

After as long as six hours in the trench, Cameron—best known for creating fictional worlds on film (Avatar, Titanic, The Abyss)—is to jettison steel weights attached to the sub and shoot back to the surface. (See pictures of Cameron's sub.)

Meanwhile, the expedition's scientific support team awaits his return aboard the research ships Mermaid Sapphire and Barakuda, 7 miles (11 kilometers) up. (Video: how sound revealed that Challenger Deep is the deepest spot in the ocean.)

"We're now a band of brothers and sisters that have been through this for a while," marine biologist Doug Bartlett told National Geographic News from the ship before the dive.

"People have worked for months or years in a very intensive way to get to this point," said Bartlett, chief scientist for the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE program, a partnership with the National Geographic Society and Rolex. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)

"I think people are ready," added Bartlett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. "They want to get there, and they want to see this happen."

(Video: Cameron Dive Is an Exploration First.)m

Rendezvous at Challenger Deep

Upon touchdown at Challenger Deep, Cameron's first target is a phone booth-like unmanned "lander" dropped into the trench hours before his dive.

Using sonar, "I'm going to attempt to rendezvous with that vehicle so I can observe animals that are attracted to the chemical signature of its bait," Cameron told National Geographic News before the dive.

He'll later follow a route designed to take him through as many environments as possible, surveying not only the sediment-covered seafloor but also cliffs of interest to expedition geologists.

"I'll be doing a bit of a longitudinal transect along the trench axis for a while, and then I'll turn 90 degrees and I'll go north and work myself up the wall," said Cameron, also a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence. (Listen: James Cameron on becoming a National Geographic explorer.)

Though battery power and vast distances limit his contact with his science team to text messaging and sporadic voice communication, Cameron seemed confident in his mission Friday. "I'm pretty well briefed on what I'll see," he said.

Bullet to the Deep

To get to this point, Cameron and his crew have spent seven years reimagining what a submersible can be. The result is the 24-foot-tall (7-meter-tall) DEEPSEA CHALLENGER.

Engineered to sink upright and spinning, like a bullet fired straight into the Mariana Trench, the sub can descend about 500 feet (150 meters) a minute—"amazingly fast," in the words of Robert Stern, a marine geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Pre-expedition estimates put the Challenger Deep descent at about 90 minutes. (Animation: Cameron's Mariana Trench dive compressed into one minute.)

By contrast, some current remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, descend at about 40 meters (130 feet) a minute, added Stern, who isn't part of the expedition.

Andy Bowen, project manager and principal developer of the Nereus, an ROV that explored Challenger Deep in 2009, called the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER "an extremely elegant solution to the challenge of diving a human-occupied submersible to such extreme depths."

t's official. Quebec City says it will begin construction on a new NHL-style arena this September.

Now all the city needs is a team to play in it.

Mayor Regis Labeaume announced Sunday the $400-million arena will hold about 18,000 people, saying it would be comparable to a facility built for the league's Pittsburgh Penguins a year ago.

"Today, the dream becomes a reality," he told reporters at a news conference.

Labeaume said the city can proceed with the project after finalizing an agreement with Quebecor on Friday, a week before a March 31 deadline.

The media empire landed the naming rights for the future arena and was granted exclusive rights to manage the facility.

If an NHL team is acquired, Quebecor would hand over $63.5 million for naming rights, plus $5 million in annual rent. Without one, the company would pay $33 million for the rights and an average of $3.15 million annually for rent.

"There are no more obstacles... no more uncertainty about the construction of the amphitheatre," said Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau, who was also at the news conference.

In an effort to keep the project within budget, Labeaume said the building would be trimmed down from 70,000 square meters to 64,000, a savings of about $30 million. The number of underground parking spots will also be cut, yielding another $21 million in savings.

But the budgetary breakdown of the project remains unclear, only months before construction is set to begin.

Labeaume was stingy with the financial details on Sunday and wouldn't go into specifics about the total expenses required to get the facility built.

Two Quebec ministers, Michelle Courchesne and Sam Hamad, were also on hand for the announcement. The province and Quebec City have pledged to share the cost of the project, with taxpayer money.

Courchesne said the province would make sure project stays within the projected $400-million total.

The arena is expected to be complete by September 2015, although there's no guarantee the city will ever get a team back.

The city lost its NHL team when the Nordiques moved to Denver in 1995.

Labeaume refused to speculate on whether his city was in line for a team. On Sunday, he was quick to shut down a reporter's question on the subject, perhaps trying to take a cautious approach with the league.

Just hours after the United States warned that North Korea would achieve nothing with threats or provocations, Pyongyang moved a long-range rocket it plans to test fire to a launch pad Monday, a South Korean defense ministry official said.

The news broke at the start of a two-day nuclear summit in Seoul that is bringing together leaders from the United States, Russia, China and dozens of other nations to discuss how to deal with nuclear terrorism and how to secure the world's nuclear material.

But North Korea's announcement that it plans to carry out a rocket-powered satellite launch in mid-April is overshadowing a message of international cooperation for the summit.

South Korea has said it considers the satellite launch an attempt to develop a nuclear-armed missile, while U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday such a launch would bring repercussions.

"Here in Korea, I want to speak directly to the leadership in Pyongyang. The United States has no hostile intent toward your country," Obama said during a speech to students at Seoul's Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

"But by now it should be clear, your provocations and pursuit of nuclear weapons have not achieved the security you seek. They have undermined it."

If the rocket is launched, South Korea is prepared to "track its trajectory," said the defense ministry official, who did not want to be named.

"There are concerns that parts of the rocket may fall within South Korean territory," he said. "If that were to happen it would threaten lives and cause damage to the economy. To guard against that, they (the military) will be tracking the orbit."

The official did not say what steps South Korea would be forced to take if it determined the rocket was falling within its territory.

The rocket was moved to a launch pad in the northeastern portion of Dongchang-ri, a village in northwest North Korea, the official said.

A magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck central Chile Sunday night, the strongest and longest that many people said they had felt since a huge quake devastated the area two years ago. Some people were injured by falling ceiling material, but there were no reports of major damage or deaths due to quake-related accidents.

The quake struck at 7:30 p.m. about 16 miles (27 kilometers) north-northwest of Talca, a city of more than 200,000 people where residents said the shaking lasted about a minute.

Buildings swayed in Chile's capital 136 miles (219 kilometers) to the north, and people living along a 480-mile (770-kilometer) stretch of Chile's central coast were briefly warned to head for higher ground.

Residents were particularly alarmed in Constitucion, where much of the coastal downtown at the mouth of a river was obliterated by the tsunami caused by the 8.8-magnitude quake in 2010.

Panic also struck in Santiago and other cities, with people running out of skyscrapers, and many neighborhoods were left partly or totally without electrical power. Phone service collapsed due to heavy traffic.

"There are some injuries but nothing serious," said Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter, who was serving as acting president while Sebastian Pinera is on tour in Asia.

Hinzpeter said authorities were conducting a thorough survey of the affected regions to look for damage.

The Chilean navy's hydrographic and oceanographic service and the national emergency office called off a tsunami warning for most of the central coast after an analysis showed the quake wasn't the type to provoke killer waves.

The alert was restored for the area closest to the epicenter after police noticed the ocean had retreated about 130 feet (40 meters) from the shore in the towns of Iloca and Duao. A sharp outsurge of surf sometimes is followed by a tsunami.READ MORE

Tomorrow's world of "The Hunger Games" doesn't just showcase the reality TV spectacle of teenagers battling to the death — it also features futuristic hovercraft, force fields and bioengineered "Mutt" creatures. Those technological marvels represent tools of oppression for the dystopian nation of Panem, where the Capitol elite live in high-tech luxury supported by the old-fashioned sweat of district coal miners, farm hands and factory workers.

But the popularity of the "Hunger Games" series has not stopped some fans from eying the technological imbalances of the story. Some question why a post-apocalyptic North America filled with futuristic technologies would still rely upon coal for its electricity needs; others wonder about the story's complete absence of the Internet. One character in "The Hunger Games" books complains about "forgotten" military technologies such as high-flying planes, military satellites and robotic drones, even as he rides inside a hovercraft.

Such "gaps" in technology don't necessarily represent plot holes, according to historians of science and technology. Real societies have adopted or rejected technologies based on whether they suited their particular economic, political or cultural circumstances.

"Technology is not pre-determined as "better" — it becomes better when a society deems it to be better or more advanced," said Joline Zepcevski, a researcher with a Ph.D. in the history of science and technology at the University of Minnesota. "With respect to "The Hunger Games," there is no reason why a new society, rising from the ashes of an old society, would necessarily re-invent the same technologies."

Technology has come and gone throughout history, said Marie Hicks, an assistant professor of history of technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago. Electric cars appeared on U.S. roads at the start of the 20th century, but disappeared for almost a century before making their recent comeback. Supersonic civilian jetliners made their debut with the Concorde in 1976, but ended up grounded in 2003.