Boston bombings terror trial begins

Gruesome details of injuries sustained by victims of the Boston Marathon bombings were recounted to jurors on Wednesday as lawyers for the Muslim student on trial for the attack admitted he carried out the bloody assault.

Nearly two years after what was the worst attack on US soil since 9/11, 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial got under way in a federal court packed with victims, survivors and the media.

The Kyrgyzstan-born US citizen faces the death penalty if convicted of the bombings which killed three people and wounded 264, on April 15, 2013.

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South Korea's wages depressed as baby boomers delay retirement

South Korea's Puretech, a small supplier of mobile phone components, has a workforce increasingly made up of ageing baby boomers.

The company in Ansan, an industrial city near Seoul, finds older workers useful in marketing, advisory roles, and in quality control, and the work scene there is a reflection of the demographics of South Korea, which like Japan, is rapidly ageing.

South Korea's legion of older workers has helped keep the jobless rate low but has exacerbated record low employment among the young - less than half of those aged 15 to 29 have jobs. It is also a cause of the decade-long stagnation in wage growth, dampening consumption.

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Alien abduction? Stolen by Russia? MH370 theories keep coming

A year on from the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, an extraordinary amount of key data remains unknown - fuelling conspiracy theories and heated online debate about one of aviation's biggest mysteries.

An information vacuum has nourished a cottage industry of experts and amateurs in cyberspace who continue to exhaustively pick the case apart in a bid to find out just what happened to the plane and its 239 passengers and crew.

The resulting theories range from the wild - alien abduction, MH370 and its doomed fleetmate MH17 were the same plane - to sober, science-based arguments that the plane is in the southern Indian Ocean, but not necessarily in the current search area.

What they all agree on is that some key pieces of the puzzle are missing.

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Vienna again tops survey of world's nicest cities

Vienna, Austria's elegant capital on the Danube river, has again been commended as offering the best quality of life of any city in the world.

Baghdad, once more, was deemed the worst to live in.

Hot on Vienna's heels were Zurich in Switzerland and Auckland, New Zealand. The rest of the top 10 were Munich, Vancouver, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva, Copenhagen and Sydney, according to the ranking of 230 cities.

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India's censor blocks Fifty Shades Of Grey from cinemas

India's government censors have said they will not allow the big-screen adaptation of erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey to be shown in Indian cinemas, a decision most had anticipated in the largely conservative country.

The chief executive of the Central Board of Film Certification, Shravan Kumar, declined to say why the panel refused to approve the film adaptation, but said Universal Pictures, the Comcast Corp unit that released the film, could appeal the decision.

A Universal Pictures source familiar with the review process said the board had objected to some of the film's dialogue, even after the studio made voluntary edits to the film to tone down its sex scenes and removed all nudity.

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