Global News

A TransAsia Airways (6702.TW) plane with 58 passengers and crew on board careered into a river shortly after taking off from a downtown Taipei airport on Wednesday, killing 23 people and leaving 20 missing, officials said. Fifteen people survived the...

Only eight out of China's 74 biggest cities passed the government's basic air quality standards in 2014, the environment ministry has said. The most polluted cities were in north-eastern Hebei, the province that surrounds the capital Beijing. Beijing and Shanghai both...

The International Court of Justice has rejected claims of genocide by Serbia and Croatia against each other during the Croatian war of secession from Yugoslavia. The Croatian government had alleged that Serbia committed genocide in the town of Vukovar and...

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has ordered an investigation into a cartoon apparently depicting the Prophet Mohammad in an official Palestinian newspaper. The move came less than a month after Abbas joined world leaders in a march for free speech in...

Iraq's cabinet approved on Tuesday two draft laws aimed at ending sectarian rifts, one creating a national guard and the other reforming government policies towards ex-members of the Baath party. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's spokesman Rafid Jaboori described the national...

President Sergio Mattarella called on Italian lawmakers to make fighting organized crime and corruption a priority, using his first speech as head of state to highlight two of the country's most persistent economic and social scourges. "Corruption has reached an...

Italian lawmakers elected Sergio Mattarella, a constitutional court judge and veteran center-left politician, as president on Saturday, handing a welcome political victory to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Mattarella, speaking at his office in the Constitutional Court after the vote, said:...

An Egyptian court on Saturday banned the armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas and listed it as a terrorist organization. The ruling came days after the country faced some of the bloodiest attacks on security forces in years. Hamas is...

Islamic State militants struck at Kurdish forces southwest of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Friday morning, while bombs in Baghdad and Samarra killed at least 21 people, security and medical sources said. Police in the northern province of Kirkuk...

Ninety-year-old Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, one of Africa's most divisive figures, ascended to the rotating chairmanship of the African Union (AU) on Friday, casting a shadow over the continental body's relations with the West. The only leader Zimbabwe has known...