The JW Marriott's Marquis Dubai formally opened Feb. 26 after gaining the title of tallest hotel from Guinness World Records. At 355 meters (1,099 feet), the hotel would tower over skylines in most cities. But in Dubai, it sits in the shadow of its more than twice-as-high neighbor, the Burj Khalif, the world's tallest skyscraper at 828 meters (2,717 feet). The exterior side entrance of the JW Marriott's Marquis Dubai. (Photo courtesy of JW Marriott Marquis Hotel Dubai)...

According to its official statements, North Korea is ready to go to the brink. But how serious are Pyongyang's threats? This week, new U.N. sanctions punishing the North's successful December rocket launch have elicited a furious response from Pyongyang: strong hints that a third nuclear test is coming, along with bigger and better long-range missiles; "all-out action" against its "sworn enemy," the United States; and on Friday, a threat of "strong physical countermeasures" against South Korea...

The Navy said Friday that it is reviewing whether its camouflage working uniforms are safe for sailors at sea after a test revealed exactly how flammable the material is. In October, a test conducted by the Navy Clothing Textile Research Facility in Natick, Mass., showed the 50/50 cotton-nylon blend uniforms worn by most sailors aboard ships will burn and melt until they're completely consumed. In contrast, Army and Marine combat uniforms are designed to be self-extinguishing and are made of...

While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled. And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care. The case that led Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University in Canberra to this idea is that of a profoundly ill young...

Sudan and South Sudan have asked the African Union to help hammer out details of a proposed withdrawal of troops from their disputed border, defense ministers from both countries said on Monday, as stalled talks continued to delay oil exports. Week-long negotiations in Khartoum failed to reach an agreement on how to withdraw their armies, a step both sides had said was necessary to resume oil exports from landlocked South Sudan through Sudan. "We will meet in Addis Ababa on the 15th to continue...

 While the name of the play may not indicate it’s a holiday tale, Theatre Macon Director Jim Crisp deliberately chose “Meet Me In St. Louis” for the holidays. “We have to do something really happy and I love this because of the sweetness of the story. It’s about a family and it is openly and unabashedly nostalgic. It harks back to an era or eras in our past lives when things seemed a little simpler and easier and Christmas was about family and spending those times together,” he said. While...

A new doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, shows that, in contrast to traditional scholarly claims, Dionysian cultic activities may very well have occurred in archaic Rome in the decades around 500 BC. Maenad playing a tambourine, satyr blowing pipes, and the young god with his panther dance. From the Villa Quintiliana on the Appian Way.Roman, 100 CE A strong scholarly tradition rooted in the 19th century denies the presence of Dionysian ecstatic rites, cults, and satyr plays...

Archaeologists have unearthed remnants of what they believe is a 1,000-year-old village on a jungle-covered mountaintop in the Philippines with limestone coffins of a type never before found in this Southeast Asian nation, officials said Thursday. National Museum official Eusebio Dizon said the village on Mount Kamhantik, near Mulanay town in Quezon province, could be at least 1,000 years old based on U.S. carbon dating tests done on a human tooth found in one of 15 limestone graves he and other...

A British soldier has given birth to a boy while serving in Afghanistan at the same desert camp where Prince Harry is deployed and a Taliban attack last week killed two U.S. Marines. The birth in a field hospital is thought to be the first time a serving member of Britain's military has gone into labor in a combat zone. The solder, a Fijian national serving as a gunner with the Royal Artillery, delivered the child Tuesday at Camp Bastion. The sprawling British base in southern Afghanistan's Helmand...

The Pakistani authorities had earlier called on the army as police struggled to contain the crowd of thousands with tear gas and live rounds. Some protesters had said they would not leave the diplomatic enclave until the US embassy was on fire. Protests over the film, Innocence of Muslims, have claimed several lives. It was made in the US and is said to insult the Prophet Muhammad. Streets leading to the enclave, where most of the embassies are housed, were earlier blocked off by shipping containers...

 An actress who appears in the anti-Muslim film trailer that has sparked riots in the Middle East is suing the filmmaker for fraud and slander, and is asking a judge to order YouTube to take down the clip. Cindy Lee Garcia's lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles claims the actress was duped by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man behind "Innocence of Muslims" who has been forced into hiding since its 14-minute trailer rose to prominence last week. She was unaware of the film's anti-Muslim content...

On September 8, 2012, a suicide bomb ripped through the diplomatic quarter in Kabul, right outside the headquarters of ISAF in the Afghan capital. No members of the international coalition were harmed in the attack. Instead, six young Afghan children lost their lives. Four of the children were members of Skateistan, the skateboarding school in Kabul that made headlines last month when a photo captured an Afghan girl skateboarding in Bamiyan. The blast in front of the ISAF compound killed 14-year-old...

 Russian opposition punk band Pussy Riot have released a new video in which they set fire to a portrait of President Vladimir Putin in a stunt likely to anger the Kremlin. Three of the band's members - Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich - were last month given two-year jail sentences each after storming the altar of Moscow's main cathedral and staging a "punk prayer", calling on the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Putin. Their jail sentences - for the crime of...

 For the first time in a decade Tanya Angus, who is fighting a life-and-death battle against gigantism, has stopped growing. At seven feet and 400 pounds, she now has some hope. Angus, a 33-year-old from Las Vegas, was diagnosed with acromegaly, a rare pituitary disorder that causes the body to produce too much growth hormone. It affects about 20,000 Americans. Since 2010, when ABCNews.com first told her story, Angus has grown an inch taller and gained 30 pounds. Before the disease began...

 A Nepali man who was bitten by a cobra snake subsequently bit the snake to death, a local newspaper reported on Thursday (Aug. 23). After being bitten by the snake, while he was working in his rice paddy on Tuesday, 55-year-old Mohamed Salmo Miya chased the snake, caught it and bit it until it died, the Annapurna Post reported, according to Reuters. "I could have killed it with a stick but bit it with my teeth instead because I was angry," Miya was quoted as saying. Miya, who lives in...

The M1 Abrams tank has survived the Cold War, two conflicts in Iraq and a decade of war in Afghanistan. No wonder – it weighs as much as nine elephants and is fitted with a cannon capable of turning a building to rubble from two and a half miles away. But now the machine finds itself a target in an unusual battle between the Defense Department and lawmakers who are the beneficiaries of large donations by its manufacturer. The Pentagon, facing smaller budgets and looking towards a new global strategy,...

Hundreds of firefighters, backed by water-bombing planes, battled a wind-fuelled wildfire in northeast Spain Monday that left four French nationals dead and trapped thousands of people indoors. The blaze claimed its fourth life Monday when a 64-year-old Frenchman who suffered 80 percent burns after his car was engulfed in flames died at a Barcelona hospital, the Catalan regional government said. Another 23 people were injured, including eight who remain in hospital, it added. The wildfire broke...

Tomorrowland, the biggest music festival in the world, is coming to you. Tomorrowland TV, a new partnership between concert organizers and YouTube, will feature eight hours of live streaming per day. The channel will showcase the work of 173 staff members, working from an on-site studio and select spots throughout the 65-acre grounds in Belgium. Last year's festival drew over 180,000 dance music revelers, and this year looks to be even bigger, with 400 DJs and three full days of raving (festival...

Thirteen people were killed before a long siege was ended at a popular hotel outside the Afghan capital, during which Taliban gunmen took scores of hostages, another bold attack that showed a potent insurgency remains after more than a decade of war. Five militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades, suicide bomb vests a nd machine guns attacked the exclusive, lakeside hotel around midnight on Thursday, bursting into a party and shooting dead hotel guards. Kabul police chief Ayoub Salangi said...

Most Americans have gotten used to regular news reports about military and CIA drones attacking terrorist suspects – including US citizens – in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere abroad.But picture thousands of drone aircraft buzzing around the United States – peering from the sky at breaches in border security, wildfires about to become major conflagrations, patches of marijuana grown illegally deep within national forests, or environmental scofflaws polluting the land, air, and water.By some government...