Syrian rebels made advances Tuesday in a fierce battle for control of a Palestinian camp in Damascus that forced refugees to flee after an army ultimatum for them to leave, residents and a watchdog said.

Forces loyal to President Bashar Assad meanwhile carried out air strikes on the Eastern Ghuta region stretching along the east of the capital as well as its southern outskirts, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

An assassin slit the throat of Egypt's last great pharaoh at the climax of a bitter succession battle, scientists said Monday in a report on a 3,000-year-old royal murder.

Forensic technology suggests Ramses III, a king revered as a god, met his death at the hand of a killer, or killers, sent by his conniving wife and ambitious son, they said.

A judge late Monday denied Apple's request to ban a set of Samsung smartphones from the U.S. market after a jury found the South Korean electronics titan guilty of patent infringement.

Even though Apple was victorious in the patent case, the iPhone and iPad maker failed to prove that the technology at issue was the driving factor in people's buying decisions, U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh said in her ruling.

A Hollywood premiere of notoriously violent director Quentin Tarantino's latest film "Django Unchained" was canceled Monday, the latest such response to the Connecticut school massacre.

A string of movies and TV shows have been pulled or postponed since Friday's shootings, while sporting events have held moments of silence and players have worn black armbands to honor the victims, 20 of whom were young children.

A four-year-old boy has died of bird flu in Indonesia, the health ministry said Tuesday, the 10th fatal case in the country this year.

The boy, from Bogor district in western Java, died on December 6 after a week of high fever.

Two NASA probes crashed into the moon on Monday after spending months gathering data by orbiting miles above the lunar surface, the U.S. space agency said.

The site where the tiny probes, dubbed Ebb and Flow, crashed will be named after astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

Russia said Tuesday that two of its nationals along with an Italian steel worker had been abducted in Syria on a motorway from the port city of Tartus.

"By all appearances, they are Russians," Russian news agencies quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying on a visit to the Central Asia state of Uzbekistan.

Before the creation of the Earth, there was only silence and darkness, only the sky and the sea until the deities Tepeu and Gucumatz created trees, animals and man -- so says the Mayan holy book.

The Popol Vuh is a spiritual and philosophical book that explains the creation of the world. Even today, it plays an important role in defining the identity of ethnic Mayas in Mexico and central America.

Christians are the world's biggest religious group, numbering some 2.2 billion people, according to a study released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Pew assembled data on the size and geographic distribution of eight major religious groups, including non-believers.

The U.N. Security Council renewed its sanctions regime against the Afghan Taliban on Monday, but adapted it to help those on the blacklist travel outside of Afghanistan for peace talks.

There are 132 individuals and four entities on the current sanctions list, and diplomats voiced hope that the travel exemptions would help promote peace and reconciliation with foreign troops due to leave the country in 2014.