U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday called for U.N. Security Council sanctions on Syria, saying there was no excuse for inaction when people were being “tortured and murdered” by their government.

"For the sake of Syria -- and the peace and security of the world -- we must speak with one voice. Now is the time for the United Nations Security Council to sanction the Syrian regime, and to stand with the Syrian people," Obama told the United Nations General Assembly.

A runaway steer stopped traffic on a major highway, hurtled over a brick wall and damaged two police vehicles during a Tuesday morning chase that had four Arizona law enforcement agencies scrambling.

The male bovine escaped from a livestock trailer Tuesday morning on Interstate 8 just east of Yuma in southeastern Arizona, Yuma County sheriff's Capt. Eben Bratcher told The Associated Press.

A dog eating carnival in China dating back more than 600 years has been banned after public outrage at the cruel way the animals are slaughtered, state media said Wednesday.

The dogs are killed and skinned in the streets of Qianxi township in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang during the festival, which is usually held in October, the official Xinhua news agency said.

A local town council in central Turkey has built a morgue with a warning system in case dead bodies come back to life, Anatolia news agency reported Wednesday.

The municipality of Malatya province has equipped its new mortuary with refrigerators sensitive to movement inside, Anatolia said.

Anti-Gadhafi fighters on Wednesday admitted heavy losses and hospitals full of wounded from their assault on the deposed Libyan despot's hometown of Sirte, forcing them to send abroad critically hurt troops.

At least 45 National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters have been killed and more than 200 wounded -- mostly by explosions or gunfire -- since they launched an offensive against Sirte last week, medics in Misrata said.

Independent Chinese cinema has boomed out of the sight of censors because of new, handheld digital video cameras, several directors said at Spain's foremost film festival.

The earliest known film from British director Alfred Hitchcock screens in Los Angeles this week for the first time in more than 80 years -- but it would have been lost to history if not for an eccentric hoarder half a world away in New Zealand.

The only known print of the 1923 feature "The White Shadow" lay in a garden shed in the North Island town of Hastings for decades, alongside hundreds of other films from the silent era.

Riot police clashed with hundreds of Tunisian immigrants on Wednesday during a protest against conditions at a reception center on the tiny island of Lampedusa, Italian media said.

Police with shields and batons herded the immigrants into the corner of a raised terrace and beat them, forcing many to drop four meters into a courtyard to escape the blows, according to images published by SKY TG 24 television.

The sex life of Octopoteuthis deletron -- O. deletron, if you prefer -- is a cruelly hit-or-miss affair, according to candid footage of the deep-sea squid in its element, unveiled Wednesday.

No foreplay, no tender caresses, no fond farewells until the next union, just a desperate drive to reproduce followed by a glancing quickie and an early death.

General Motors said Wednesday China would be the world's fastest growing auto market over the next decade, as it unveiled its latest bid to give it a greater slice of the clean energy vehicle segment.

GM executives made the forecast at the opening of a center in Shanghai, where the company's international operations are now based, to develop new technologies to make autos lighter and batteries for electric cars.