South Korea said talks with North Korea on reopening a jointly-run industrial estate ended without agreement Wednesday, but the two sides agreed to meet again next week.
The South's chief delegate Suh Ho said talks on restarting the Kaesong industrial complex's mothballed factories would continue on July 15, after about four hours of meetings that started Wednesday morning.
Full StoryPresident Barack Obama's nominee to head the FBI told lawmakers Tuesday he believes waterboarding is "torture" and that national security officials should steer clear of the interrogation practice.
James Comey, a former deputy attorney general who publicly broke with the Bush White House in 2004 over a secret surveillance program, is expected to win bipartisan confirmation by the U.S. Senate.
Full StoryThousands of mourners silently lined Sarajevo's avenues on Tuesday as three trucks carried the remains of 409 newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre to their final resting place.
The convoy was taking the coffins to the small village of Potocari near Srebrenica, where the victims will be buried in a ceremony on Thursday -- on the 18th anniversary of Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
Full StoryThe wife of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was recovering in a hospital Tuesday after suffering a health scare, with doctors ruling out that she had had a stroke or heart attack.
Teresa Heinz Kerry, 74, remains in fair condition at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where she was admitted on Sunday after showing "seizure-like symptoms," Kerry's personal spokesman Glen Johnson said.
Full StoryPortugal's leaders sought Tuesday to cap a one-week political crisis that pushed the government to the brink of collapse and raised fears for its 78-billion-euro ($100-billion) international bailout.
Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho appeared to have assured the survival of the coalition led by his Social Democratic Party, albeit at the price of promoting his foreign minister to the position of deputy prime minister.
Full StoryAn Afghan soldier shot dead a Slovakian soldier on Tuesday, officials said, in the latest "insider attack" to shake efforts by the NATO coalition and the Afghan army to work together to defeat the Taliban insurgency.
The attack occurred outside Kandahar airfield, one of the biggest military bases in southern Afghanistan and a hotbed of the 12-year conflict with the Islamist rebels, a senior Afghan officer told Agence France Presse.
Full StoryU.S. electronic espionage operations have targeted a variety of Latin American countries besides regional heavyweight Brazil, including key Washington ally Colombia and its nemesis Venezuela, a Brazilian newspaper reported Tuesday.
The report in O Globo was the latest in a series on U.S. electronic surveillance operations based on documents leaked by fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Full StoryThe Taliban have temporarily closed their office in Qatar, where it was hoped a peace deal would be brokered with the U.S. and Afghanistan, blaming "broken promises", an insurgent official said on Tuesday.
"We have temporarily closed the Qatar office due to broken promises," a Pakistan-based Taliban official, who declined to be named, told AFP by telephone.
Full StoryAround 100 African migrants stormed a border fence from Morocco into Spanish territory on Tuesday, leaving five police officers injured, Spanish authorities said.
Officials said about 40 of the migrants managed to cross the fence separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco on the Mediterranean coast, in the latest in a wave of such attempts.
Full StoryFloods that caused billions of dollars (euros) in losses were the world's most expensive natural disasters so far this year, with central Europe being hit hardest, reinsurers Munich Re said on Tuesday.
Altogether, natural catastrophes -- also including earthquakes, tornados and heat waves -- caused $45 billion (35 billion euros) in losses in the first half of 2013, well below the 10-year average of $85 billion.
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