GAZA: Egyptian policemen blocked the crossing into the Gaza Strip yesterday to protest against the kidnapping of Egyptian security forces in the Sinai, witnesses and sources said.
Muslim devotees raise their hands to receive sweets as offerings after prayers inside the shrine of Muslim saint Shah e Alam, during Urs in the western Indian city of Ajmer.
Bahraini security forces raided the house of top Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim yesterday, the opposition said, an act likely to enrage the island's majority Shi'ite population, which is at loggerheads with its Sunni rulers.
AN American contractor imprisoned in Cuba has settled a lawsuit in which he accused the company he was working for and the US government of failing to warn him about the risks of working there.
NIGERIAN forces used jets and attack helicopters to bombard Islamist militant camps in the north-east yesterday, in their biggest military offensive since Boko Haram launched an uprising in 2009.
ANKARA: Turkish police have detained a man they believe to be one of the main perpetrators of car bombings that killed more than 50 people near the Syrian border, officials have said.
BAGHDAD: At least 32 people were killed in two explosions outside a Sunni Muslim mosque in Baquba, about 30 miles north-east of Baghdad, after Friday prayers, police and medics said.
A system of donor cards indicating consent for organ transplants will not work in China as families will insist on having the final say, and many people see nothing wrong in using organs from executed prisoners, an official said yesterday.
BUENOS AIRES: Jorge Rafael Videla, an austere former army commander who led Argentina during its Dirty War dictatorship and was unrepentant about state-ordered kidnappings and murders, died yesterday aged 87.
ROME: Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, above, has promised a wide reform of property tax, addressing one of the main issues dividing his coalition government, but gave no details on how he would find the money to pay for it.
THE outgoing head of the Internal Revenue Service in the US yesterday provided little help to lawmakers investigating the targeting of conservative groups by the tax agency.
The nightclub dancer at the centre of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's "bunga bunga" sex trial told a court yesterday that guests at the media tycoon's parties dressed as nuns, nurses and US President Barack Obama.
THE outer bands of Cyclone Mahasen struck the southern coast of Bangladesh yesterday, lashing remote fishing villages with heavy rain and fierce winds and forcing the evacuation of more than a million people.
