Over the previous decade, from 1982 to 1992, de Souza had established himself as a screenwriting wunderkind. Most screenwriters can't land one blockbuster; he had a baker's dozen to his name, including Commando, The Running Man, 48 Hours, Another 48 Hours and Die Hard 1 and 2. As a bona fide hit-maker, the young writer had amassed enough creative capital to do what so many successful screenwriters aspired to before him: become a director

Media near and far will be focused this week on the three-year anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that shook Japan on March 11, 2011. Without diminishing the conversation in Fukushima, it's worth shifting our cultural gaze for a few moments to the March 10 commemoration in Tokyo of an event of equal or greater proportion. That would be the U.S. air raids that annihilated the city back in 1945 — among the deadliest attacks of World War II.

It's a way of downloading movies, it's a startup, and with a hidden stream of revenue, BitTorrent is also a grand Silicon Valley experiment: How many times can a company reinvent itself in the hunt for a hit product?

In Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English, I examine how words borrowed from different languages have influenced English throughout its history. The above feature summarizes some of the main data from the book, focusing on the 14 sources that have given the most words to English, as reflected...

What makes a dog breed go extinct? Some are mated out, completely turned into new types of dogs to fit the fashion or function of the day. Others are wiped away by predators (humans included) or ignored by the breeders that had sustained them. No matter how it happened, extinction for dog breeds is permanent. Here are 11 examples of dogs that no longer walk the earth.

One of the great statistical mysteries that persist several years after a natural disaster is the figure that appears without fail each month in columns representing the number of people that are still missing. Almost three years after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal regions in Tohoku on March 11, 2011, a total of 2,636 people remain missing as of February, statistics released by the National Police Agency show. More than 15,800 were killed.

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web. What started as a way for scientists to share research has changed life worldwide forever.

The Marblehead Lighthouse in Marblehead,Ohio on Lake Erie

This is the Bugatti Model 100P: A 900 HP, 500 MPH, race plane imagined by none other than legendary automotive designer Ettore Bugatti, so technologically advanced that it could have single-handedly dominated the skies of WWII for Germany, had the Nazis ever gotten their hands on it. But after more than seven decades of obscurity in a French barn, the "Veyron of the Skies" is ready to finally take flight for the first time.

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is not the first airborne drama that has raised more questions than answers. Did the jet disintegrate on its own? Did a bomb blow it up? Was it hijacked? For now, the answers are lost at sea. Here are some of the biggest past mysteries involving plane crashes and disappearances

In March 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee published a paper proposing an "information management" system for his laboratory. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, scrawled some brief comments on the cover: "Vague, but exciting."

Each 2-ounce bottle of Original Red Tabasco red sauce contains exactly 720 drops. While competitors sell their hots in much bigger bottles, Tabasco still sees the smaller one as its trademark. The privately held company says the little bottles account for about 40% of total annual sales, notably fueled by growth overseas.

AT this very moment, in plain view of the entire world, the final demise of the Soviet empire is unfolding. The plan for its resurrection, long in the works at the Kremlin, has failed: Ukraine has proved that it has matured into an independent state that will determine its own domestic and foreign policy.

One-per-centers have been around for a long time, probably since the late Neolithic period, when nomadic hunter-gatherers settled into farming communities. The concept of private property—of land that could be handed down to one’s heirs—and the advent of metallurgy, which created durable symbols of prestige, contributed to social stratification.

While the world’s attention has been focused on Russia’s Crimean land grab, the Chinese have taken the opportunity to further an ongoing land grab of their own in the South China Sea's Spratly Islands. Not that there's much land to grab. The Spratlys comprise more than 750 islands — the number varies depending on whether it's high or low tide — that amount, in total, to less than two square miles of land scattered across 164,000 square miles of ocean.

The spring of 1942 was a perilous time for Americans, caught, as they were, in a new war. The preceding December, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. American troops in the Philippines were close to surrender. The Wehrmacht had advanced across Europe and into the Soviet Union and North Africa. Many people wondered whether the United States had a “crusading faith” to fight for...

THE youngest Briton to fight in World War I was just 12 years old — but Sidney Lewis’ identity remained unknown for almost a century until the chance discovery of faded documents revealed his extraordinary story.

Uncover the secrets behind the world's most elusive organisation. From lost nuclear devices to undercover feline agents,we find out what the CIA have been trying to hide from us.

Somewhere in either Chicago, Baltimore or Washington, someone plunked down $3,995 to buy the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the first handheld cellphone, on March 13, 1984 — 30 years ago today. We don't know who that first cellphone buyer was. At the time, the occasion didn't register as historically auspicious. After all, in 1984, the terms "cellphone" and "mobile phone" didn't refer to handheld phones; those terms referred to car phones, which had been around since the mid-1940s.

If video gaming is designed to be a form of escapism, why would anyone choose to escape to a dead-end, soul-sucker of a job? "You play a border inspector at a contentious check-point," says Lucas Pope, 36, the developer responsible for the most unlikely of smash hits. "People are coming into your booth, and they want to get from one side to the other. You've got to check their documents and make sure everything's in order before you let them through.