A heavy-handed police crackdown on Turkish protesters marking the one year anniversary of deadly anti-government demonstrations earned Ankara Sunday strong rebuke from the Council of Europe.
"I condemn the excessive use of force by the Turkish police against demonstrators and journalists," Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, said in a statement sent to Agence France Presse.
Full StoryTwo Italian priests and a Canadian nun seized by suspected Boko Haram gunmen in Cameroon two months ago have been freed, a security source told Agence France Presse Sunday.
The hostages were "freed overnight, at about 2 in the morning. Our soldiers picked them up from a village close to Amchide," in the north of the country, the Cameroonian security source said.
Full StorySeven asylum-seekers sewed their lips shut Sunday as part of a mass hunger strike protest involving hundreds of detainees in an Australian immigration detention center, activists said.
Refugee activists said seven Iranian men had stitched their lips to protest their detention on Australia's remote Christmas Island for almost a year under punitive policies aimed at deterring people-smuggling voyages.
Full StoryTwo people have been killed and hundreds treated in hospital after a weekend heatwave swept over Japan, officials and reports said Sunday.
A 74-year-old women collapsed while working in a greenhouse in the eastern prefecture of Chiba on Saturday and was later pronounced dead.
Full StorySouth Korea urged North Korea Sunday to release a Seoul missionary sentenced to hard labor for life for allegedly spying and operating an underground church, calling his sentence "deeply regrettable".
Kim Jeong-Wook -- captured in the North last October -- faced an array of charges including illegally entering the country, spying for Seoul's intelligence agency, running an underground church and other "anti-state propaganda and agitation", according to the North's official KCNA news agency.
Full StoryA Frenchman who spent over a year in Syria has claimed responsibility for last week's deadly shooting at a Jewish Museum in Brussels in a video recording, prosecutors said Sunday.
Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, who was arrested by customs agents on Friday on arrival in the southern French city of Marseille, is believed to have recorded the claim in a 40-second video found in his possession along with a Kalashnikov and a handgun.
Full StoryRussian divers Sunday recovered five bodies from the wreckage of a helicopter that crashed into a lake in the remote northwestern tundra with 18 people including top regional officials and businessmen on board.
Two people were rushed to hospital with broken legs after the Mi-8 helicopter smashed into Munozero lake in a remote area on the northwestern Kola peninsula late Saturday, regional officials said.
Full StoryThe missing captain of an oil tanker that exploded and sank off a Japanese port has been found dead, according to the coastguard.
Divers found a body in the ship's hold on Saturday and it was later confirmed as that of captain Masaichi Ando by his family, the coastguard said.
Full StoryA series of suspected Boko Haram attacks in four villages in Nigeria’s restive northeast killed several people, residents said Sunday, in the latest violence blamed on the Islamist insurgents.
The military was not immediately available to comment on the raids in Borno state, the hardest hit area during Boko Haram’s five-year extremist uprising, which has killed thousands.
Full StoryA series of moderate earthquakes and aftershocks hit the Philippines early Sunday, with U.S. geologists estimating the shallowest -- a magnitude-5.1 tremor -- at just one kilometer deep, but there were no initial reports of damage.
The first quake struck off the southern island of Mindanao at around 3:00 am local time (19:00 GMT), some 30 kilometers (17 miles) east-northeast of the city of Cortes, according to the USGS.
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