World News Archive

THOUSANDS of people have protested in Rome against austerity policies and high unemployment, urging new Prime Minister Enrico Letta to focus on creating jobs to help pull the country out of recession.

French President Francois Hollande has signed into law a bill allowing same-sex marriage, making France the 14th country to legalise gay weddings.

Egyptian police, angered by the kidnapping of seven colleagues by Islamist gunmen, kept a crossing into the Gaza Strip closed again yesterday, stranding hundreds of Palestinians, witnesses said.

RUSSIA has named the alleged CIA station chief in Moscow, following its decision to expel a US diplomat accused of trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer as a spy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

A car bomber attacked a Nato convoy in the Afghan capital yesterday, killing at least 15 people and wounding more than 30, officials said.

IT'S said that scattered around the office of Major General Sarkin Yaki Bello are piles of books on the Taliban and Afghan war.

The Kremlin said a spy dispute could impede efforts to improve ties with the United States, but did not threaten any more action after the expulsion of a diplomat accused of trying to recruit a Russian agent.