The night began like any other. Sarah John was busy preparing the evening fire at her village, when suddenly seven armed men appeared from among the shadows. “They were dirty and smelly, had ragged clothes and hair unlike any normal human being,” she says now, three weeks after the incident. The uninivited visitors began ransacking [...]

Mexicans have come to be numbed by the relentless reports of gruesome violence this year, but the brutal scene revealed to the public on Wednesday was enough to stun them anew. The 72 corpses were piled up haphazardly around the edge of the breezeblock barn, arms and legs twisted over each other, waists and backs [...]

BAGHDAD – They are different wars in different regions, with different challenges. But as the war in Iraq winds down, there is a lot the U.S. military can learn and apply to Afghanistan, from how to deal with contractors to when to draw down troops.
Many practices will need to be adapted to a different [...]

BEIJING — Yu Jie has picked a fight with the Communist Party of China , and if state security forces haul him away in the dark of night, there will be no one to stop them. It's a risk Yu took knowingly when he wrote a book published this month that slammed the country's prime [...]

We’ve all heard the story by now. Fed up with his job as a JetBlue flight attendant, Steven Slater grabbed two beers, activated the emergency inflatable chute and slid out of his job and into his 15 minutes of fame. But only a few people on the plane actually watched it happen: like many dramatic [...]

AMSTERDAM – The monumental chestnut tree that cheered Anne Frank while she was in hiding from the Nazis was toppled by wind and heavy rain on Monday.
The once mighty tree, now diseased and rotted through the trunk, snapped about 3 feet (1 meter) above ground and crashed across several gardens. It damaged a brick [...]

NASSAU, Bahamas – Rescuers in boats saved six people, including two children and a pregnant woman, who were found clinging to the wreckage of a small plane that crash landed Monday in waters off the Bahamas.
The twin-engine Piper Aztec went down about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from Grand Bahama Island after one of its [...]

Beirut, Lebanon – On Monday night, the leader of Hezbollah showed intercepted Israeli reconnaissance footage and confessions of Israeli spies to back his accusation that Israel was responsible for the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri – an explosive murder under investigation by an international tribunal.
“Israel has the capability to carry out [...]

Urban planning votes do not usually garner widespread attention in the US. But this week, when New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission okayed the demolition of a 19th-century coat factory on Park Place, the story made front pages. The decision removed the last obstacle to building a 15-storey, $100m mosque-cum-community centre a stone’s throw from [...]

AMMAN, Jordan – Jordan said Tuesday it has evidence that a rocket attack on its Red Sea port originated from neighboring Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
For its part, Egypt has strongly denied that any of the rockets fired at Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat on Monday came from its soil.
It was the second such [...]