Sony Pictures said Tuesday it will screen madcap comedy "The Interview" in some U.S. theaters on Christmas Day, a dramatic U-turn after its widely criticized decision to cancel the film following a cyber-assault blamed on North Korea.

A treaty laying down international rules for the $85 billion dollar global arms trade goes into force on Wednesday with campaigners vowing to make sure it is strictly implemented.

The United States -- by far the world's largest arms producer and exporter -- has signed the treaty, but has yet to ratify it. 

A Tibetan woman died Tuesday after setting herself on fire in protest at China's rule of the Himalayan region, rights groups and media said.

Tsepe Kyi set herself alight in the center of a town in Aba county, known in Tibetan as Ngaba county, in southwest Sichuan province, Free Tibet and U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA) said.

Hundreds of Cubans congregate each morning outside the U.S. interests section in Havana, hoping to get an elusive visa to visit their relatives in the united States.

This office, set up to partially restore the diplomatic contact the United States severed in 1961, was long the rallying point for anti-American protests spurred on by fiery speeches from communist leader Fidel Castro.

A U.S. police officer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin who shot and killed an African-American man in a park last April will not be charged, prosecutors said Monday.

The incident -- in which Dontre Hamilton, 31, was shot 14 times -- prompted demonstrations that foreshadowed the August shooting of unarmed teenage Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

China condemned "cyber terrorism" on Monday after U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to consider officially labeling North Korea, accused by Washington of hacking Sony Pictures, a state sponsor of terrorism.

U.S. President Barack Obama hit back at foreign policy critics in an interview aired Sunday, brushing off claims he had been naively outmaneuvered by Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine crisis.

Iran has seized on Washington's historic rapprochement with Cuba after five decades of Cold War standoff as proof that big power sanctions do not work.

North Korea's alleged hack of Sony Pictures was not an act of war, President Barack Obama said in an interview aired Sunday, as Pyongyang threatened reprisals if targeted with sanctions. 

Obama's Republican critics have accused North Korea of waging "cyber warfare" by targeting Sony, urging the president to respond robustly to the crisis.

The United States has dismissed a call by North Korea for a joint investigation into the hacking of Sony Pictures and wants China to help block cyber attacks from Pyongyang.

Washington blames North Korea for a breach of cyber security at Sony which led to the release of embarrassing emails and prompted executives to halt the release of "The Interview".