LONDON: Britons voted on Thursday in a knife-edge general election that could put their country’s membership of the European Union in question and raise the likelihood of independence for Scotland. Polls opened at 7 a.m. (0600GMT) with voters deciding between Prime Minister David Cameron’s center-r

KATHMANDU: Nepal has banned flying of drones in its skies following the devastating earthquake, suspecting leakage of sensitive information through the use of the unmanned aerial vehicle, authorities said today. After the April 25 quake, some foreign media and other aid agencies used drones to tr

Kenya: The United States said Monday it will give $45 million to help Kenya deal with an increasingly complex refugee crisis in a region long defined by Somalia’s endemic violence, but where war in nearby Yemen is now creating conditions so dire that some people are even fleeing to Somalia. In Nair

YOLA, Nigeria: Hundreds of girls and women, many bewildered and traumatized, are being registered, fed and given medical care in their first day out of Nigeria’s war zone. The group of 275 women and children are among the nearly 700 freed in the past week by the Nigerian military from Boko Haram ex

BAGHDAD: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a surprise visit today to Iraq, pledging to continue Canada's support for the battle against the Islamic State group as bombings across the country killed at least 30 people. The Canadian government has announced USD 139 million in additional a

KATMANDU: One thousand EU citizens are still unaccounted for in Himalayan Nepal, diplomats said Friday, almost a week after a massive earthquake that has claimed more than 6,300 lives and left survivors desperate for aid. The Europeans had mostly been climbing in the avalanche-hit Everest region an

Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) On Day Six of Nepal's tragedy, life triumphed as rescuers pulled an 15-year-old from the rubble of a multistory residential building in one of Kathmandu's hard-hit neighborhoods. A large crowd erupted in cheers as Pemba Tamang was carried out on a stretcher. He was we

BEIJING: The United States and other countries will be welcome to use civilian facilities China is building in the South China Sea for search and rescue and weather forecasting "when conditions are right", China's navy chief has told a senior US officer. China claims 90 percent of the South China

KANO: Nigerian troops have rescued about 160 more hostages from Boko Haram's Sambisa Forest stronghold in northeast Nigeria, the country's army told AFP on Thursday. "We are still trying to compute the actual number of those rescued. But tentatively there are about 60 women of various ages and ar

KATMANDU The death toll in the recent Nepal earthquake reached 5,000, sources said on Tuesday. Hungry and desperate villagers rushed toward relief helicopters in remote areas of Nepal Tuesday, begging to be airlifted to safety. “The ground keeps shaking, even this morning it did. Every time it

The humanitarian situation in Yemen has become catastrophic, relief officials said on Monday, as Saudi-led aircraft pounded Iran-allied Houthi militiamen and rebel army units for a second day, dashing hopes for a pause in fighting to let aid in. Residents said warplanes flew between 15 and 20 sortie

Nearly a million children have been "severely affected" by a severe earthquake in Nepal that has killed more than 3,200 people, a spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said, as rescue and aid workers struggle to cope. With hundreds of thousands of Nepalis sleeping out in tents

KATMANDU: Rescuers dug with their bare hands and bodies piled up in Nepal on Sunday after an earthquake devastated the heavily crowded Katmandu Valley, killing at least 1,900, and triggered a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest. Army officer Santosh Nepal and a group of rescuers worked all night to o

Israeli warplanes struck military targets in Syria early Saturday, according to media reports that were not confirmed by Israeli or Syrian officials. According to Arab media and pro-opposition sources in Syria, the strikes targeted several bases belonging to Syrian missile brigades in the mountai

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: NASA on Thursday marked the silver anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope with fireworks, of a celestial kind, conveyed by the orbiting observatory itself. To commemorate Hubble’s launch on April 24, 1990, NASA selected a picture of a stellar nursery located about 20,000

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama said he took "full responsibility" on Thursday for the accidental killing of an American and Italian hostage during an apparent drone strike on an al-Qaida compound in Pakistan. Lifting the lid on a classified operation, a solemn Obama expressed his "deepest apo

SANTIAGO: Southern Chile's Calbuco volcano erupted on Wednesday for the first time in nearly half a century, spewing a giant funnel of ash high into the sky and prompting authorities to declare a state of emergency. Officials ordered an evacuation for a 20-kilometer (12-mile) radius around the vo

BEIJING: Solar Impulse (Si2), the solar plane on a mission to fly around the globe without a drop of fuel, arrived at the Chinese city of Nanjing on Tuesday on the final leg of its stay in China. The Swiss-made plane arrived in Nanjing at 11.26 p.m. on Tuesday after nearly 17 hours of flight from