CULTURE AND SPORT

Maybe Brodrick Bunkley's stay in Denver will last longer than his trip to Cleveland.

The boy wizard is going out with a bang as "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- Part 2" has surpassed $1 billion in sales.

Crisis legislation to yank the nation past the threat of a historic financial default sped through the House, breaking weeks of deadlock.

Norwegians believe penalties for serious crimes in their country should be tightened in the wake of a shooting and bomb attack that killed 77 people, a poll showed.

The soldiers sleep in tents and protected by high-powered rifles that also ward off the even more dangerous threat of poachers.

International Grand Master Le Quang Liem ranked second at the Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting.

Khieu Thi Huyen Trang, winner of Vietnam’s Next Top Model 2010, received the Best Asian Super Model title in the 23rd World Best Model contest.

The Vietnamese Vovinam martial arts delegation has won the second World Vovinam Championships that took place in Ho Chi Minh City.

British-based banking giant HSBC has announced it will sell 195 retail branches to First Niagara Bank for an estimated $1 billion.

Two single-engine float planes collided as they flew near an Alaskan lake and one of them crashed and burned, killing the four people aboard, authorities said.

Michael Owen scored to lift Manchester United to a 2-1 victory over Barcelona in a friendly football match that reprised their clash in the Champions League final.

Republican congressional leaders and President Barack Obama made a last-minute stab at compromise to avoid a government default.

Anders Behring Breivik has told investigators he also considered attacking other targets linked to the government or the prime minister's Labor Party, police said.

British police investigating phone hacking at the News of the World were set to extend their probe into claims that computers were hacked.

One director sees the rise in gratuitous sex scenes in Vietnamese cinema as just a way to increase sales.

Queen Elizabeth II's eldest granddaughter Zara Phillips and her fiance Mike Tindall threw a party on a yacht with Prince William and wife Catherine.

NASA plans to launch a solar-powered spacecraft called Juno that will journey to Jupiter in search of how the huge, stormy giant was formed.

British pay-TV giant BSkyB said that James Murdoch will remain chairman despite the phone-hacking row at main shareholder News Corp.

The world’s number 27 Le Quang Liem of Vietnam held his higher-ranked Hikaru Nakamura of the US, number 6th in the world, to a tie on July 28.