Scott Neuman

It's been a great year! Or, has it?

You might be asking yourself that as you scroll through your Facebook feed trying to ignore that "Year in Review" app that randomly gathers your photos and scotches them together into a presumed personal narrative of 2014.

But not everyone is thanking ...

The newest galaxy to be discovered is actually very old – and very small. And it's right in our neighborhood of the universe.

Although Kks3 is only 7 million light years away (about 2.5 times farther than our nearest large galaxy, Andromeda) at just 1/10,000 the stellar mass of ...

A military operation involving Pakistani airstrikes and ground troops has killed 39 Islamist militants, including several top commanders near the Afghan border, the military says. It comes a day after the country's security forces said they'd killed the alleged organizer of a deadly assault on a school last week that ...

Updated at 5:45 p.m. ET

Police from around the country are gathering at the Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens today to honor a fallen comrade, Officer Rafael Ramos, who was fatally shot in an unprovoked attack one week ago along with his partner, Wenjian Liu.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and ...

Top al-Shabab leader Zakariye Ismail Ahmed Hersi, for whose capture the U.S. has offered $3 million, has turned himself in, an intelligence official in Somalia says, according to The Associated Press.

The AP says: "The intelligence officer says he turned himself in to Somali police in the Gedo region. The ...

Updated at 9:35 a.m. ET

North Korea is blaming the United States for Internet outages experienced by the Asian nation last week, accusing President Obama of being "reckless in words and deeds" and comparing the U.S. to "children with runny noses."

Pyongyang's latest remarks come days after North Korea's ...

NPR's Carrie Kahn reports that the body of a kidnapped Catholic priest has been discovered after he was seized in the southern state of Guerrero earlier this week.

The body of Rev. Gregorio Lopez Gorostieta was found with a gunshot wound to the head, not far from the seminary where ...

Updated at 7:50 p.m. ET

Hundreds of police officers gathered in New York Friday for the wake of officer Rafael Ramos, one of two patrolmen who were killed last weekend. The gunman's motive may have included revenge for the deaths of two unarmed black men at the hands of authorities.

Two Saudi women arrested nearly a month ago for flouting a ban on female drivers have had their cases referred to a court established to try terrorists, according to The Associated Press.

Using driver's licenses obtained in the United Arab Emirates, Loujain al-Hathloul, 25, and Maysa al-Amoudi, 33, were arrested ...

A key round of negotiations aimed at ending the fighting in eastern Ukraine has been unexpectedly called off.

Belarusian officials, who were set to host the continuation of talks in their capital, Minsk, starting today, had no immediate comment on the reason for the cancellation.

As the BBC writes:

If you can't get your new Sony PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox online today, you can blame the Lizard Squad – or (indirectly) North Korea. Or maybe neither.

The Lizard Squad purports to be a group of hackers now claiming responsibility for a denial of service attack on the two game ...

It was one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded, and it triggered the deadliest tsunami in history.

On Dec. 26, 2004, a few minutes before 9 a.m. Indonesia time, the seafloor off the island of Sumatra was thrust upward during a massive magnitude-9.0 quake. Within hours, coastal settlements in ...

The African Union has condemned an assault on the organization's main base in Somalia by al-Shabab extremists that killed three AU soldiers and a civilian contractor.

AMISOM, the AU mission in Somalia, issued a statement Thursday saying that the four had been killed in a gunfight as soldiers tried to ...

The father of a Jordanian pilot taken by militants of the self-declared Islamic State is urging his release.

As we reported on Wednesday, Jordan said Flight Lt. Moaz al-Kaseasbeh was captured by ISIS after his plane crashed over northern Syria.

"The militants, on social media, and the ...

Sierra Leone, the country hardest-hit by an ongoing Ebola outbreak, has imposed a lockdown in the country's north in an effort to contain the spread of the deadly virus.

The BBC quotes local officials as saying that shops, markets and non-Ebola related travel would be shut down. Many public ...

A vigil and a march in Berkeley, Mo., were largely peaceful overnight after confrontations between police and protesters Tuesday in the wake of the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old black man by a white police officer.

Antonio Martin was shot and killed on Tuesday after police say he pointed a ...

Pope Francis, in his Christmas Day blessing in St. Peter's Square, denounced the "brutal persecution" of religious and ethnic minorities and condemned conflicts in Ukraine, Libya and elsewhere.

It was his second "Urbi et Orbi" ("to the city and to the world") message since becoming pope last year, the pontiff ...

The gunman who killed two officers in a Brooklyn neighborhood of New York on Saturday told passersby moments before the shooting to "watch what I am about to do," a senior police official says.

NYPD Director of Investigations Robert Boyce, speaking at an afternoon news conference about the killings ...

Kurdish fighters, supported by coalition warplanes, pushed into the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, days after breaking a siege of a mountain where ethnic Yazidis had been trapped for months by Islamist extremists.

Massoud Barzani, an Iraqi Kurdish leader claimed his peshmerga forces had already taken a "large area" ...

In what could prove a sneak peek at the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a strong critic of President Obama's decision to open relations with Cuba, appears to be stepping up an attack on fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul over his support of the policy shift.