Scott Neuman

SpaceX successfully launched 60 communications satellites on Monday using a single rocket.

It's the second time in less than a year that Elon Musk's company has made such a launch, marking a dramatic increase in the number of satellites in orbit.

Mercury is tiny. But it's a big deal for thousands of amateur astronomers in the Western hemisphere who will be watching the planet on Monday as it makes a transit across the disk of the sun.

It may not be as spectacular as the solar eclipse two years ago, or even the 2012 transit of Venus. But beauty is in the eyepiece of the beholder.

Fiat Chrysler and Groupe PSA, the owner of Peugeot, agreed on Thursday to combine forces to create the world's fourth-largest carmaker by production volume.

Fire swept through a train in Pakistan early Thursday, killing more than 65 people after a natural gas cylinder being used by a passenger to cook breakfast suddenly exploded, officials said.

Some of the deaths were caused as passengers leaped from the moving railway cars to escape the spreading flames, according to multiple railway officials.

A fire at Okinawa's Shuri Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a popular tourist attraction on the southern Japanese island, has destroyed a large portion of the historic compound.

Television video showed firefighters on Thursday trying to contain the blaze at the wooden castle. The compound's main, north and south buildings were destroyed in the fire.

"The cause of the fire has not been determined yet, but a security company alarm went off at around 2:30 in the morning," said Ryo Kochi, a spokesman with the Okinawa Prefectural Police.

Updated 8:12 a.m. ET

Christopher Anderson, a career foreign service officer in the State Department, will tell House impeachment investigators on Wednesday that President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani stood in the way of the White House strengthening ties with Ukraine, according to a copy of Anderson's opening statement obtained by NPR.

Actor and comedian John Witherspoon, whose first roles were on 1970s TV shows such as Barnaby Jones and The Richard Pryor Show but who was best known for his role as the crotchety dad in the Friday films, has died at 77.

Witherspoon's family confirmed his death in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Pope Francis is hoping to give the Vatican Secret Archive an image makeover by changing the name of the ancient collection to something less mysterious.

Francis declared that the collection, which dates back centuries and contains millions of documents, will now be known as the Vatican Apostolic Archive.

The new name is a better reflection of the archive's "service to the church and the world of culture," the pontiff said.

Prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong has been barred from running in local district council elections after an official said his calls for "self-determination" in the territory were inconsistent with pledging an oath of allegiance to the city and its constitution.

Wong, who has been arrested twice since mass protests in the city began in early summer, is the only candidate to have been disqualified from the Nov. 24 poll on grounds of his politics.

After a record-breaking 780 days circling the Earth, the U.S. Air Force's mysterious X-37B unmanned space plane dropped out of orbit and landed safely on the same runway that the space shuttle once used.

It was the fifth acknowledged mission for the vehicle, built by Boeing at the aerospace company's Phantom Works.