AIN AMENAS, Algeria (AP) — In a bloody finale, Algerian special forces stormed a natural gas complex in the Sahara desert on Saturday to end a standoff with Islamist extremists that left at least 19 hostages and 29 militants dead. Dozens of foreign workers remain unaccounted for, leading to fears the death toll could rise. [...]
BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — Mali’s military claimed Friday that it has held control of a key town where Islamic extremists had battled forces for a week, though aid groups warned they were unable to reach the area to provide humanitarian assistance.
BEIRUT (AP) — Two car bombs exploded in southern Syria and a rocket slammed into a building in the north, killing at least 12 people in a spike in civil war violence Friday that Syrian state media blamed on rebel fighters trying to topple President Bashar Assad.
LONDON (AP) — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the U.S. is working with the British and Algerian governments to assess what is happening on the ground at a natural gas complex in the Sahara where Islamic militants are holding hostages from at least 10 countri
LONDON (AP) — Thirteen years after he stood on the podium in Sydney, Lance Armstrong was stripped of his bronze medal from the 2000 Olympics because of doping. The International Olympic Committee sent a letter to Armstrong on Wednesday night asking him to return the medal, just as it said it planned to do last [...]
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s ombudsman for children’s rights sought on Thursday to reassure American would-be adoptive parents that they will be allowed to take their children back to the United States. But some Americans with court rulings in their favor say they’re still in legal limbo.
BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — Fighting raged in one Mali town, airstrikes hit another and army troops raced to protect a third, on the seventh day of the French-led military intervention to wrest back Mali’s north from al Qaida-linked groups.
TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s two biggest airlines grounded all their Boeing 787 aircraft for safety checks Wednesday after one was forced to make an emergency landing in the latest blow for the new jet.
ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — Islamist militants attacked and occupied on Wednesday a natural gas field partly operated by BP in southern Algeria early Wednesday, killing two people and holding foreigners hostage while surrounded by Algerian forces.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — When do you not listen to the African wildlife expert? When he tells you to stand closer to the rhino. That suggestion by a South African game park owner resulted in serious injuries to a 24-year-old woman from Johannesburg. The Beeld newspaper reported Tuesday that Chantal Beyer said the game park owner [...]
BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — France is tripling the number of troops deployed to Mali to 2,500, part of the massive preparation for a land assault to dislodge the Islamist extremists occupying the West African country’s north. The increased total of French troops was confirmed in Paris Tuesday by a French Ministry of Defense official, who [...]
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — The Israeli military shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian near the West Bank separation barrier on Tuesday, Palestinians said. The Israeli military said he had breached the barrier, which separated soldiers from protesters. A classmate said a group of students threw rocks at soldiers near the barrier, a line of walls, [...]
Pakistan has summoned India’s top diplomat in the country to protest a pair of clashes along the disputed Kashmir border in the past week that killed two Pakistani soldiers. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry says the Indian high commissioner was told Friday that the attacks were “unacceptable.” The protest came a day after Pakistan said Indian [...]
International envoy Lakhdar Brahimi expressed little hope for a political solution for Syria anytime soon after meeting Friday with senior Russian and U.S. diplomats trying to bring an end to the civil war, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Brahimi, who is the joint U.N.-Arab League envoy for Syria, spent the day at [...]
Radical Islamists held on to a city in central Mali Friday after sending the Malian military reeling in retreat. With the militants showing the capability to press even further into government-held territory, international aid organizations began evacuating staff from the narrow central belt of the country. French President Francois Hollande said France, which used to [...]
QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — A bomb targeting paramilitary soldiers killed 12 people in southwest Pakistan on Thursday, while five suspected militants died in a U.S. drone strike in the country’s northwest, officials said. Separately, an explosion ripped through a crowded mosque in the northwest city of Mingora, killing 21 people and injuring more than 70 [...]
PARIS (AP) — Three Kurdish women, including one of the founders of a militant group battling Turkish troops since 1984, were “executed” at a Kurdish center in Paris, the interior minister said Thursday. The news prompted angry crowds of Kurds to flood into the area. It was not immediately clear who killed the women, who [...]
PARIS (AP) — In the last three days, Gerard Depardieu met with Vladimir Putin to get Russian citizenship, got a prime seat at soccer’s biggest annual gala in Switzerland and dashed off to Montenegro to eye some real estate. But in all this whirlwind travel, he didn’t manage to show up at a Paris court [...]
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Police had an easy time identifying one suspect in Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots: a former Miss Congeniality beauty pageant winner. Sophie Laboissonniere, who was 20 during the June 2011 riots over the Canucks’ loss in the National Hockey League finals, has pleaded guilty for rioting. She was not in court [...]
PARIS (AP) — Sex symbol-turned-animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot is threatening to join actor Gerard Depardieu in Russian exile unless France halts the scheduled euthanasia of two sick circus elephants. The 1960s screen diva says authorities have ignored her “numerous proposals” to save Baby and Nepal, a pair of 42-year-old elephants dying of tuberculosis at [...]
