SEVILLE, Spain (AP) — A wealthy, 85-year-old Spanish duchess considered the world's most title-laden noble married a civil servant 25 years her junior on Wednesday, shrugging off her children's qualms and celebrating by kicking off her shoes and dancing flamenco. A crowd of several hundred clapped and roared its approval as the Duchess of Alba waved, smiled and danced on a red carpet after her w...

WASHINGTON, Oct 5, 2011 (AFP) - US President Barack Obama mourned Apple visionary Steve Jobs Wednesday as one of America's "greatest innovators" and said it was fitting many people learned of his death on a device he invented. "He transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world," Obama said in...

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Six weeks before Michael Jackson died, his doctor recorded the semi-comatose superstar mumbling what might have been his farewell address to the world. In a slow, slurred voice, clearly under the influence of sedatives, Jackson spoke about leaving a performance legacy bigger than Elvis or The Beatles, and building a fabulous hospital for children with proceeds from his highly ...

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) -- Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has had an impact on the world which will last for generations, Microsoft boss Bill Gates said Wednesday, adding that it had been "an insanely great honor" to know him. "Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives," he said, adding that he was "truly sad...

Steve Jobs was a college dropout who built computers in his parents’ garage in the mid-1970s with a friend, Steve Wozniak. They founded what is now Apple Inc. (AAPL) in 1976 to sell their creations. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, surpassed Microsoft Corp. in 2010 to become the world’s most valuable technology company. A timeline of Jobs’s career follows: Feb. 24, 1955: A boy is born in...

STOCKHOLM (AP) -- Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals, a chemical structure that researchers previously thought was impossible. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Shechtman's discovery in 1982 fundamentally changed the way chemists look at solid matter. Contrary to the previous belief that atoms were pa...

Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor ranked 17th and 61st in brand value for this year, as assessed by a global consulting firm. Their ranking inched up two and four notches, respectively, from 19th and 65th from a year earlier, according to the top 100 list selected by Interbrand. In its “Best Global Brands 2011,” Interbrand said Samsung Electronics’ brand value reached $23.4 billion (27.6 tr...

A new study of seabirds showed those who are abused when they are young often grow up to be abusers. In Nazca boobies in the Galápagos, traumatic abuse of developing young significantly increases the chances those maltreated individuals will exhibit the same maltreatment later in life as adults, researchers at Wake Forest University said. "We were surprised by the intense interest that many adu...

The brain damage that characterizes Alzheimer's disease may originate in a form similar to that of infectious prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob, according to newly published research by The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. "Our findings open the possibility that some of the sporadic Alzheimer's cases may arise from an inf...