NEW YORK (AP) — The archives of the late Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, spanning from letters and wedding pictures to manuscripts and screenplay drafts, have been acquired by the New York Public Library.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A comet is streaking back our way after 50,000 years.
The dirty snowball last visited during Neanderthal times, according to NASA. It will come within 26 million miles (42 million kilometers) of Earth Wednesday before speeding away again, unlikely to return for millions of years.
HONOLULU (AP) — A camera atop Hawaii’s tallest mountain has captured what looks like a spiral swirling through the night sky.
Researchers believe it shows the aftereffects of a SpaceX rocket launch when the company's Falcon 9 rocket sent a GPS satellite into orbit.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A federal lawsuit in Nevada is seeking class-action damages for countless hotel patrons who booked rooms in Las Vegas since 2019, alleging that most hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip have used a third-party vendor to illegally fix prices.
NEW YORK (AP) — For decades, work on a massive rail project has been grinding 15 stories below the shuffling footsteps of millions of New Yorkers and beneath the East Hudson River and Manhattan skyscrapers.
CHIANG MAI, Thailand (AP) — Just a handful of Chinese visitors were posing for photos and basking in the sun this week in the market and plazas near Chiang Mai’s ancient Tha Phae Gate, one of many tourist hotspots still waiting for millions of Chinese travelers to return.
PARIS (AP) — The United Nations' cultural agency decided Wednesday to add the historic center of Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa to its list of endangered World Heritage sites, recognizing “the outstanding universal value of the site and the duty of all humanity to protect it.”
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Cannons boomed and pirates galore swarmed downtown Tampa on Tuesday in a prelude to this weekend's Gasparilla Pirate Fest, expected to draw up to 500,000 revelers to the shores of the bay.
DALLAS (AP) — The U.S. Transportation Department said Wednesday it is investigating whether Southwest Airlines deceived customers by knowingly scheduling more flights in late December than it realistically could handle.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Texas troubadour Willie Nelson will celebrate his 90th birthday with his friends and family at an all-star two-day concert at the Hollywood Bowl this April.
BEIJING (AP) — From Jakarta to Seoul, Bangkok to Beijing, people in Asia have been celebrating the Lunar New Year marking the start of the Year of the Rabbit.
Lunar New Year is the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar, a time to gather with family, reconnect with friends and indulge in food and drink.
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Peru indefinitely shut the famed ancient ruins of Machu Picchu on Saturday in the latest sign that anti-government protests that began last month are increasingly engulfing the South American country.
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — A lawsuit claims Disneyland employees snickered at a disabled woman struggling to get off a Jungle Cruise boat before she fell and broke a leg, leading to her death from an infection five months later.
BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand ushered in a new age of train travel on Thursday as Southeast Asia’s biggest railway station officially began operations. The government says the huge, modern development on the edge of central Bangkok will bolster the country’s position as a regional hub and boost its economy.
BANGKOK (AP) — A hoped-for boom in Chinese tourism in Asia over next week’s Lunar New Year holidays looks set to be more of a blip as most travelers opt to stay inside China if they go anywhere.
From the beaches of Bali to Hokkaido’s powdery ski slopes, the hordes of Chinese often seen in pre-COVID days will still be missing, tour operators say.
The CEO of United Airlines said Wednesday that other airlines won’t be able to handle all the flights they plan to operate this year, leading to more disruptions for travelers.
Scott Kirby said airlines that operate as if this is still 2019, before the pandemic, are bound to struggle.
BEIJING (AP) — Hairdresser Wang Lidan is making an emotional Lunar New Year journey from Beijing to her hometown in northeastern China — her first in three years after the government lifted its strict “zero-COVID” policy that kept millions of people at home and sparked protests.
SYDNEY (AP) — A Qantas flight traveling from New Zealand to Sydney landed safely on a single engine after it issued a mayday call over the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday.
Qantas Flight 144 with 145 passengers aboard landed at Sydney Airport from Auckland, New Zealand, after a 3.5-hour flight between the neighboring nations' most populous cities.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Authorities in South Africa are searching for a tiger that escaped from its enclosure at a private farm near Johannesburg over the weekend, injured a man and killed a dog.
Local media said the man survived the attack but was taken to the hospital.
JERUSALEM (AP) — A hundred years after taking in scores of children whose parents were killed in the Armenian genocide, a 19th-century orphanage in Jerusalem's Armenian Quarter has reopened its doors as a museum documenting the community's rich, if pained, history.
POKHARA, Nepal (AP) — A plane making a 27-minute flight to a Nepal tourist town crashed into a gorge Sunday while attempting to land at a newly opened airport, killing at least 68 of the 72 people aboard.
JERUSALEM (AP) — When Israel struck an agreement with the United Arab Emirates to open diplomatic ties in 2020, it brought an electrifying sense of achievement to a country long ostracized in the Middle East.
DALLAS (AP) — Airline executives bristled last year when government officials, led by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, blamed the carriers for causing thousands of flight cancellations and mistreating their customers.
HONOLULU (AP) — A cloud shot up vertically like a plume of smoke in a matter of seconds before a Hawaiian Airlines flight last month hit severe turbulence and 25 people on board were injured, according to a preliminary report Friday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
DALLAS (AP) — Dallas Zoo officials said Friday that a missing clouded leopard was found after a daylong search. Evidence was found that the fence of the small cat's habitat had been “intentionally” cut, police said.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The historic Nevada Northern Railway Museum is mourning the death of its resident cat who became an unlikely internet sensation.
Dirt — short for Dirtbag — died Wednesday in the town of Ely at the age of 15, the railway said on its website.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Lisa Marie Presley will be buried at Graceland, the famed home of Elvis Presley that on Friday became a gathering place for fans distraught over her death a day earlier.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three months after having her first baby and not long after she completed the Emmy-nominated series “PEN15,” Anna Konkle liked the sound of filming her next project in a remote Mexican jungle.
BERLIN (AP) — Germany will soon drop a mask mandate on long-distance trains and buses, one of the country's last remaining COVID-19 restrictions, the health minister said Friday.
The U.S. Department of the Interior announced Thursday that it has given new names to five places that previously included a racist term for a Native American woman.
The renamed sites are in California, North Dakota, Tennessee and Texas, completing a yearlong process to remove the historically offensive word “squaw” from geographic names across the country.
U.S. air travel returned mostly to normal Thursday, a day after a computer system that sends safety information to pilots broke down and grounded traffic from coast to coast.
By midafternoon on the East Coast, about 150 flights had been canceled and more than 3,700 delayed — much lower figures than on Wednesday, when more than 1,300 flights were scrubbed and 11,000 delayed.
NEW YORK (AP) — David Byrne's “American Utopia” may have left Broadway but the Talking Heads leader is plotting a return — with disco.
BERLIN (AP) — Travelers whose package tours were ruined by the imposition of restrictions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic may be entitled to at least a partial refund, the European Union's highest court said Thursday.
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Protests against Peruvian President Dina Boluarte’s government that have left 48 people dead since they began a month ago spread through the south of the Andean country on Wednesday with new clashes reported in the tourist city of Cusco.
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (AP) — Laurie Morse shoveled wet sand into bags in the pouring rain Wednesday, preparing to stack them along her garage in a last ditch effort to keep out a rising creek on California’s central coast, as the storm-ravaged state braced for another round of lashing rains and damaging winds.
DALLAS (AP) — Until Wednesday, few travelers had ever heard of a Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, nor did they know that the system used to generate those notices could cause widespread travel misery.
Thousands of travelers were stranded at U.S. airports Wednesday due to an hours-long computer outage.
The Walt Disney Co. is making several changes at its domestic theme parks, including some easier reservations, in order to improve the public perception of its business.
Among the changes: it will cease charging for overnight self-parking at its Walt Disney World resorts; Walt Disney World annual passholders will be able to visit the theme parks after 2 p.m.
TOKYO (AP) — Japan and South Korea defended their public health restrictions on travelers from China on Wednesday, a day after China stopped issuing new visas in both countries in apparent retaliation.