Typhoon Man-yi hit central Japan Monday, with almost 300,000 households told to evacuate and fears the storm could go on to hit the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

Japan began switching off the nation’s last working nuclear reactor Sunday for a routine inspection, with no immediate plan to restart it due to to public hostility towards atomic power.

A new wave of insurgent attacks, mostly car bombs targeting Shiite-dominated cities in central and southern Iraq, killed at least 35 people on Sunday, officials said.

A coal mine collapse has killed at least 27 miners in the north of Afghanistan, officials said on Sunday, with rescue efforts under way to save about 12 workers trapped underground.

Losing power was like being “hit by a fist”, Australia’s first female prime minister Julia Gillard said Saturday, recounting the pain of being dumped by her party.

A Taliban suicide bomber killed three civilians in southern Afghanistan on Saturday when he detonated explosives in a failed attempt to target foreign forces fighting the Islamist insurgents, officials said.

A secretive Syrian military unit has been moving stocks of chemical weapons to as many as 50 sites to make it harder for the US to track them, a media report said on Friday.

Ray Dolby, an American inventor and audio pioneer who founded Dolby Laboratories, has died at the age of 80.

Moscow: The three crew of the International Space Station (ISS) who returned to Earth this week endured a hair-raising descent after their height sensors failed, a Russian cosmonaut revealed.
Pavel V

Moscow: A fire swept through a Russian psychiatric hospital overnight, killing thirty seven people, officials said.
 
The fire in the one-story hospital in the village of Luka in the northwestern Nov