National / International News

Former England captain Michael Vaughan says out-of-competition drug testing would be a step forward for cricket.

NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health created a unique poll to gauge what children across the country are eating, drinking and doing as far as physical activity goes. Here's why.

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Prominent Zambian opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema is freed on bail after pleading not guilty to a charge of inciting violence in the tourist town of Livingstone.

At least 20 people are killed in a fire at an illegal paper and plastics market in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta.

The idea of slashing federal spending for most Americans is a lot like losing weight or eating more vegetables — sounds great as an abstract aspiration, but not so easy when it gets down to the details.

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Russian officials say horsemeat has been found in "pork" sausages imported from Austria, the latest in a series of such discoveries across Europe.

A computer scientist shows off a see-through computer where users can interact with digital content, at the TED (Technology, Education and Design) conference in Los Angeles.

Councillors approve plans for the £4m Star of Caledonia public artwork to mark the Scotland-England border at Gretna.

Three people are left dead and seven injured after a man opens fire at a wood processing factory near the Swiss city of Lucerne, police say.

Thousands of medical students face having their first hospital job offers withdrawn due to marking errors in their final exams.

Three men are found guilty of abducting a 13-year-old girl and forcing her to become their sex slave.

The defining experience when using a smartphone is the diverse set of apps, the little programs, you load on it to make the phone do things. Increasingly, there's a choice of operating system, too. Sure there's Apple iOS, Google Android, Windows Mobile -- but at a big conference on mobile technology in Barcelona, Spain, a Samsung phone using a strange operating system was announced.

Samsung's new OS is called Tizen, and there are other rivals coming soon, including one from the browser maker, Firefox.

Sarah Rotman Epps, senior analyst at Forrester Research, joins Marketplace Tech host David Brancaccio to discuss where Tizen will be used and why Samsung is launching the new alternative system.

"March madness" is around the corner. So is the selection of a new pope. Religion News Service is bringing the two together.

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Best friend on model’s last hours and planned Oscar Pistorius gift

The restaurant chain hopes a new system for analyzing big data sets will help it spot patterns of complaints across its more than 170 outlets in a matter of hours, not weeks. The goal: to spot problems small and big (soggy pickles? foodborne illness?) before they balloon.

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A Northern Ireland man launches a legal challenge to compel Facebook to stop his 13-year-old daughter using the site or publishing images on it.

Apple has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit brought by angry parents who said their kids racked up big bills on iTunes purchases. They're called "in-app" purchases and they usually let players of a free game buy extra weapons or to get to a new level or get a whole bunch of virtual goldfish.

That's what happend to Mike Betrand of Boca Raton, Fla. A couple of years ago, his three young children got very into a free iPad game called Tap Fish. "It’s a little virtual aquarium," he explains. "If you want to buy different tanks or you want to buy little castles or little fish, you have to use what appears to be play money."

Thing is, it's not play money. Bertrand discovered this when he happend to notice an Apple iTunes receipt in his email for $149.

"I started going through some other receipts that were trapped in my spam folder and found out that, over the course of about a week, my kids tallied about $1,500 on the game."

Bertrand says his kids had no idea what they'd done. "The kids were very surprised to learn that they were spending real money and really confused about it."

In the proposed settlement, Apple will compensate 23 million angry parents who say the company didn't have proper parental controls in place for in-app purchases. Apple will dole out $5 iTunes gift cards to many parents. Those whose charges topped $30 will get a seperate reimbursement.

Colby Zintl of advocacy group Common Sense Media applauds the ruling, a notes that Apple has since put in place an option that will allow parents to block those purchases. Still, Zintl says, these supposedly free games need standard protections.

"In the case of a game like Smurfs, these kids aren’t even reading," she says. "The ability to press a button and you’re charging your parents’ credit card, you have to question what the business practices are." 

Rene Ritchie, editor in chief of tech news site iMore. says those business practices grew out of Apple's app marketplace. He points out early app games charged as much as $10. But nobody wanted to pay that much, "and this model emerged called 'fremium,'" he says.

That’s when the game itself is free, but things inside the game cost money. "Instead of having to earn something in a game, you just buy it," Ritchie says. "Instead of having to wait for your car to get more power or your solider to get more life back, you can buy it immediately. People lose patience and spend money on the game."

Betting on impatience works. Ritchie says all of the top grossing games right now are free...ish.

And they're going to stay free if Mike Bertrand has anything to say about it. "My kids don't know my iTunes password anymore," he laughs.

A father accused of killing his six children in a house fire joked about the night of the blaze to a police officer, a court hears.

Police are investigating the death of a climber who died during an operation to rescue him on Ben Nevis.

Centrica says profits from British Gas' residential energy supply rose 11% to £606m last year, as colder weather meant people used more gas.