QUITO (Ecuador): Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano has spewed a 6-mile (10-kilometer) column of ash after a powerful, five-minute explosion that shot pyroclastic material onto its northern and northwestern flanks. Ecuador's geophysics institute said Friday's blast occurred at 6:10pm local time and was

BEIJING: A Chinese ship involved in the Indian Ocean search for flight MH370 detected a "pulse signal" at a frequency used by aircraft black boxes Saturday, but Australia warned there was no evidence yet that it was linked to the missing plane. China's Xinhua news agency said the signal picked up

A soldier shot dead three colleagues and injured 16 others at the US Army's Fort Hood base in Texas before killing himself, the military says. US media named the suspect as Ivan Lopez, 34, although his identity has not been officially confirmed. The gunman had served in Iraq and had mental healt

LONDON: Domestic workers employed by wealthy foreigners and diplomats in the UK are being beaten, abused and paid as little as £100 a month, according to a major new report. Interviews with 33 overseas cleaners, nannies and cooks have revealed a system that is failing to hold abusers to account o

YOKOHAMA, Japan - Climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world's oceans, scientists reported on Monday, and they warned that the problem is likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control. The report by the

Aboard rescue flight 74, over the Indian Ocean:  As the U.S. Navy surveillance plane veered sharply back toward white objects floating in the ocean below, an automated voice warned, "Banking! Banking!" The console settings in the cockpit showed the plane at merely 500 feet above the sapphire seas gl

Air pollution kills about 7 million people worldwide every year, with more than half of the fatalities due to fumes from indoor stoves, according to a new report from the World Health Organization published Tuesday. The agency said air pollution is the cause of about one in eight deaths and has n

UNITED NATIONS: Russia and the United States exchanged threats on Wednesday at a tense UN security council meeting over the Ukraine crisis, with the Russian envoy saying the US ambassador's "insults'' are jeopardizing Moscow's willingness to cooperate with Washington on other diplomatic matters.

WASHINGTON: The United States on Tuesday suspended operations of Syria's embassy in Washington and its consulates and told diplomats and staff who are not US citizens or permanent residents to leave the country. State department officials said while embassy and consular activities were affected t

France's foreign minister says that leaders of the Group of Eight world powers have suspended Russia's participation in the club amid tensions over Ukraine and Russia's incursion into Crimea. The other seven members of the group had already suspended preparations for a G8 summit that Russia is sc

NEW DELHI: Amid global speculation on what exactly caused Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370 to jump radar contact and disappear, an ugly suspicion has taken roots in China that it could be the handiwork of Uighur terrorists. If this turns out to be correct, it would be the biggest attack by Uighurs

Washington:  Astronomers have spotted the largest yellow star ever observed in our galaxy and 1,300 times larger than the sun. The yellow hypergiant star HR 5171 A is also in the top-10 of the largest stars known and about one million times brighter than the sun, Olivier Chesneau, whose team made

NEW YORK: A building in New York City's East Harlem area collapsed today following an explosion with reports of people trapped in the rubble. The building collapsed this morning and authorities said they were responding to reports of people trapped in the rubble, according to fire officials. W

Sepang, Malaysia:  The mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 deepened on Monday when a sweeping search failed to find any sign of the jetliner near its last known location, leaving experts to puzzle over how a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard could have vanished without a trace. The search w

KUALA LUMPUR/PHU QUOC ISLAND, VIETNAM: The disappearance of a Malaysian jetliner is an "unprecedented mystery", the country's civil aviation chief said on Monday, as a massive air and sea search now in its third day failed to find any trace of the plane or 239 people on board. Dozens of ships and

Moscow:  Leaders of both houses of Russia's parliament said on Friday they would support a vote by Crimea to break away from Ukraine and become a new region of the Russian Federation, the first public signal that the Kremlin was backing the secessionist move that Ukraine, the United States and other

Houston:  A 21-year-old Indian-origin student has mysteriously disappeared while vacationing with friends in the US state of Florida, even as the search was on for an Indian-American who went missing in New York. Reny Jose, a mechanical engineering major and a member of Martel College at Rice Uni

Washington:  An asteroid the size of a football field is about to make a close pass by Earth but is not expected to hit or cause any damage, NASA said on Wednesday. Coined 2014 DX110, the asteroid will be part of a rare class of objects that comes nearer than the moon, and will shave by at around