A Japanese man said to be the world's longest-serving death-row inmate has been released from prison after 48 years and granted a new trial after DNA testing backed his contention that evidence against him was fabricated. Iwao Hakamada was convicted ...

In his 1992 novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson described the “metaverse”: an immersive online simulation of the real world, visited by millions through virtual-reality goggles. Palmer Luckey, a fast-talking 21-year-old, was not yet born when the sci-fi author ...

What is Facebook? To many of its 1.2bn regular users, it is a place to share photos and chat with friends. To its founder Mark Zuckerberg, it is a virtual world where members could eventually spend most of their daily lives. That is the vision behind Mr ...

HTC, the struggling Taiwanese smartphone maker, is hoping to make its comeback against Apple and Samsung with a new flagship phone. The Android-powered HTC One (M8), launched on Tuesday at simultaneous events in New York and London, ...

A second mass trial of Islamist supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the ousted Egyptian president, opened in the southern town of Minya, a day after the same court handed down 529 death sentences in an unprecedented ruling that has provoked local and ...

A second mass trial of Islamist supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the ousted Egyptian president, opened in the southern town of Minya, a day after the same court handed down 529 death sentences in an unprecedented ruling that has provoked local and ...

As Ukraine ordered the withdrawal of its remaining armed forces from Crimea on Monday Moscow sent in the rouble, moving swiftly to consolidate its control of the newly annexed peninsula. Oleksandr Turchynov, Ukraine's acting president, said he had ...

A new telescope at the South Pole has detected the first evidence of “gravitational waves” – ripples in the fabric of space-time originally predicted almost a century ago by Albert Einstein. The discovery, announced at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for ...

In less than a month, most of the world's ATMs and a large portion of its computer-based industrial control systems will become a lot more vulnerable to hackers and viruses. On April 8, Microsoft will stop issuing updates and patches for bugs in its Windows XP ...

The hunt for missing flight MH370 has expanded to involve 25 countries across two vast corridors of ocean and land across much of Asia, after Malaysia requested help in what has become the biggest ever search for a missing aircraft. The sheer size of the ...

Malaysia has confirmed military radar spotted an unidentified aircraft in the Strait of Malacca not long after Malaysia Airlines lost touch with flight MH370, as a multinational hunt for the missing aircraft continued to yield no result. The latest development in the ...

Uncertainty is spreading across the Moscow business community as investors steel themselves for the fallout from expected tougher sanctions on Russia by the US and the EU over any secession of Crimea. US and European officials meeting in London on ...

China said it would bolster its military spending by 12.2 per cent in 2014, continuing an almost unbroken string of double-digit annual increases over the past two decades. The government said that the official defence budget would grow to Rmb808bn ...

The Obama administration is considering placing Iran-style banking sanctions on selected Russian financial institutions if Moscow were to send troops into eastern Ukraine. The banking sanctions are one of a series of measures that the administration has ...

Western diplomats have muzzled any public celebration of the downfall of Ukraine's Russian-leaning president and are instead showering Moscow with respectful phone calls and promises to take its interests on board. The decision to restrain any ...

Barcelona's tax problems over the €57.1m transfer of Brazilian striker Neymar have prompted the La Liga champions to pay €13.6m to the tax authorities. The tax payment means the bill for the player has topped €100m when salary and bonus payments to ...

While rushing away from a rainfall of tear-gas canisters in a leafy quarter of Caracas a well-informed 22-year-old student, who wishes to remain unnamed, cries: “We could turn Venezuela into Ukraine!” after news broke of the overthrow of President ...

Jihadi militants stormed the Somali presidency on Friday in one of the most high-profile attacks on Mogadishu in recent months, underlining insecurity in the capital as the government prepares a renewed offensive against Islamist extremists. Foreign officials ...

Anti-government protesters clashed with riot police near Ukraine's parliament building in Kiev on Tuesday, stoking fresh tensions in a three-month stand-off that shows no sign of abating. Television footage showed police snipers shooting what looked to be ...

Peace talks to end the increasingly grim civil war in Syria concluded with little substantive success on Saturday, largely because of the Damascus regime's refusal to discuss any kind of transition plan that would spell its demise. Few had expected the Geneva ...