Recently in International News Category

The International Olympic Committee has launched The Olympic Athletes' Hub, a site designed as a platform to unite athletes with fans, USA Today reported.

The Hub aggregates the Facebook and Twitter feeds of over 1,000 current and former Olympians and tracks user use -- rewarding fans who interact daily on the site with exclusive video and prizes.

During the Olympic Games, which start July 27, fans will be able to interact with the athletes, get live updates, watch videos and get training tips from the likes of Nadia Comaneci, Edwin Moses, Mark Spitz and others. Cooler still, fans will be able to engage in text chats with athletes live from the Olympic Village during the games, the Wall Street Journal reported.

According to USA Today, during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, there was no official integration of the Olympics with Facebook and Twitter, which then had 100 million and 6 million users, respectively.

Exactly a century after the ship went down, passengers lined the decks of MS Balmoral, which has been retracing the route of the doomed voyage, USA Today reported.

The Titanic, the world's largest and most luxurious ocean liner, was traveling from England to New York when it struck an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912. It sank less than three hours later, with the loss of all but 700 of the 2,208 passengers and crew.

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the Titanic was built, a memorial monument was unveiled Sunday at a ceremony attended by local dignitaries, relatives of the dead and explorer Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic on the ocean floor in 1985.

David Haisman, 74, a retired seaman from the English port town of Southampton, mourned the loss of his grandfather who had been on his way to Seattle to start a new life in the United States with his wife and daughter.

"I've been brought up with the story but now I could feel it," he told Reuters. "My mother used to tell me how she got into lifeboat 14 and her feet became soaked with the 3 to 4 inches of water that remained in the bottom despite bailing."

The last time she saw her father was when he cupped his hands and shouted "I'll see you in New York".

James Murdoch stepped down Tuesday as chairman of British Sky Broadcasting, surrendering one of the biggest jobs in the Murdoch media empire in a bid to distance the broadcaster from a deepening phone hacking scandal, the Associated Press reported.

Murdoch, who had succeeded his father Rupert Murdoch as chairman in 2007, will remain on the BSkyB board. Nicholas Ferguson, the deputy chairman, will succeed him, the Financial Times reported.

"I am aware that my role as chairman could become a lightning rod for BSkyB and I believe that my resignation will help to ensure that there is no false conflation with events at a separate organization," the 39-year-old Murdoch said.

Ferguson, who retired as chairman of SVG Capital in March, will become the first person outside the Murdoch family to chair the company since its formation in 1988. Tom Mockridge, who replaced James Murdoch at News International, gained a new title of deputy chairman of BSkyB.

Prince William and Duchess Kate won't have to worry about getting to know their new neighbor - Prince Harry has moved in at Kensington Palace, CBS News reported.

According to The Daily Mail, the 27-year-old, who just returned from his first royal tour, moved his bags out from his old room in Clarence House last week and into a one-bedroom apartment inside Kensington Palace.

Royal commentator Dickie Arbiter told ABC News that there's plenty of room at the palace, saying, "they will see each other in passing or they will see each other when they come knocking but they won't be on each others' doorstep."

William and Kate currently live in Nottingham Cottage but will take over Princess Margaret's old apartment towards the end of next year and Harry will move into their two-bedroom cottage.

"The princes are very close, and Harry is also very close to the duchess," a palace source told People magazine. "They have all been thinking about this for a while, and when the opportunity came up they grabbed it."

On Friday The White House named Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College and a global health expert, as its nominee to lead the World Bank, the New York Times reported.

The decision makes Kim the front-runner to take the helm of the multinational development institution on June 30, when its current president, Robert B. Zoellick, will step down at the end of his five-year term.

Kim, 52, is an anthropologist and a physician who co-founded Partners in Health, a nonprofit that provides health care for the poor, and a former director of the department of H.I.V./ AIDS at the World Health Organization, the Minnesota Daily reported.

Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Kim earned a M.D. from Harvard University in 1991 and received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1993. He was the first Asian-American to head an Ivy League institution when he took the Dartmouth post in 2009, the New York Times said.

A video gaining international attention is trying to use the power of the Internet to stop Joseph Kony, the head of a small but infamous militia that has terrorized northern Uganda the Los Angeles Times reported.

The video depicts the Lord's Resistance Army which has reportedly been abducting children to fight as soldiers and suffer as sex slaves, as well as for mutilating its victims since the 1980s. The video has has been circulating the internet and now has over 70 million views after it was posted last week.

Many young people have joined together in support but the video has also been the subject of various criticism.

The Washington Post reported, some experts argue that the crimes of the LRA "have been exaggerated and the attention they are receiving is disproportionate." The New York Times reported the video and the campaign represent a "white savior" approach to the problems of Africa. The Huffington Post also said the campaign should be a lesson in critical thinking.

North Korea has agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and tests on nuclear weapons and allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to return to the country, the New York Times reports.

The U.S. will give 240,000 metric tons of food aid to North Korea as a part of the agreement. Though North Korea insists to be a part of the agreement, President Barack Obama said food aid would be given on purely humanitarian grounds.

New leadership could mean different ideals for the country, which has been isolationist. American officials are watching the leadership transition to leader Kim Jong-un, whose father, Kim Jong-il, died in December.

North Korea also agreed to a moratorium on launching long-range missiles, which have raised tensions in South Korea and Japan.

In the past, North Korea has backed out of agreements to alter its nuclear program. The North Korea Central News Agency's statement on the agreement said the country would carry out the agreement "as long as talks proceed fruitfully," the Boston Globe reported.

Almost five years after publishing the last book in the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling is writing an adult novel, according to L.A. Times.

The title of the book, which is set to hit the store shelves in U.S. and Britain simultaneously (at an unannounced date), has not been revealed. Little, Brown - the publisher of the the Twilight series - has the rights to the book.

Rowling said the following about the deal in a press release:

"Although I've enjoyed writing it every bit as much, my next book will be very different to the Harry Potter series, which has been published so brilliantly by Bloomsbury and my other publishers around the world. The freedom to explore new territory is a gift that Harry's success has brought me, and with that new territory it seemed a logical progression to have a new publisher. I am delighted to have a second publishing home in Little, Brown, and a publishing team that will be a great partner in this new phase of my writing life."

It is possible that the fans from the Harry Potter books will carry over to her new work. Those who were 10 years old when the first Harry Potter book was released in Britain are now turning 25.

Two Western journalists, including veteran American reporter Marie Colvin, were killed in intense shelling by President Bashar Assad's regime in the central town of Homs on Wednesday, CBS News reported.

Both Colvin and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik had been working on the front lines of uprisings in the Arab world for months.

Syrian activists said at least two other Western journalists -- French reporter Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and British photographer Paul Conroy of the Sunday Times-- were wounded in Wednesday's shelling, which claimed at least 13 lives, the Associated Press reported.

A Homs-based activist, Omar Shaker, told the Associated Press the journalists were killed when several rockets hit a garden of a house used by activists and journalists in the besieged Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, which has come under weeks of heavy bombardment by forces from Assad's regime.

New York Times foreign correspondent, Anthony Shadid, 43, died on Thursday in Syria, USA Today reported.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter died of a apparent asthma attack while covering the uprising against the president.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Shadid had long been interested in the Middle East, first because of his Lebanese-American heritage and later because of what he saw there firsthand.

He joined The Times on Dec. 31, 2009, as Baghdad bureau chief, and became the newspaper's bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, last year.

According to the New York Times, he was known most recently to readers for his coverage of the Arab Spring. He won the 2012 Pulitzer in international reporting for his reporting on the sea change sweeping the region.