The U.N. envoy for global education called Wednesday for a multimillion-dollar fund to provide education for children in emergencies and urged donors to start with $163 million to educate half a million Syrian children who are refugees in Lebanon.

Gordon Brown told a news conference Wednesday that it's time for decisive action to prevent millions of children from falling through the cracks and losing out on an education.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's victory in the Israeli election will not disrupt painstaking U.S. efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, the State Department said Wednesday.

The Israeli leader opposes any accommodation with Tehran and came to Washington during the campaign to address U.S. lawmakers and denounce the agreement under negotiation as a "bad deal."

South Korea and the United States will launch a massive landing drill next week, the climax of an ongoing joint military exercise which North Korea views as an invasion rehearsal.

The amphibious drill will start March 28 and run until April 1 at the port of Pohang, some 360 kilometers (223 miles) south of Seoul, the U.S.-South Korea Combined Forces Command said in a statement.

U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday they will not pursue criminal charges against an intelligence agency employee who lost control of a hobby drone that crashed into the White House gardens, sparking a Secret Service investigation.

The man, whose name was not released, had been flying a friend's DJI Phantom "quadcopter" around his downtown Washington apartment late on January 25 and early the next morning. 

An Indonesian court Thursday adjourned the latest legal bid by two Australian drug smugglers to avoid the firing squad, as Jakarta said they will not be executed until appeals filed by several convicts are completed.

Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, the ringleaders of the so-called "Bali Nine" drug trafficking gang, were sentenced to death in 2006 for trying to smuggle heroin out of Indonesia.

Northeastern Australia battened down Thursday in preparation for a strong cyclone forecast to hit coastal areas north of Cairns, one of the gateways to the Great Barrier Reef.

Tropical Cyclone Nathan, currently a category three storm, was tracking back towards the Cooktown area, some 260 kilometers (160 miles) from popular tourist destination Cairns, having first threatened the coast last week before moving out to sea.

Two men were killed and more than 10 wounded after gunmen burst into a pub firing automatic weapons in a suspected gang-related attack in the Swedish city of Gothenburg.

Customers in the bar were watching football on television late Wednesday when at least two gunmen, reportedly wearing skeleton masks and yellow high-visibility vests, launched their shooting spree.

Amnesty International on Thursday said two major oil companies operating in Nigeria, Shell and ENI, reported a combined 553 oil spills in 2014, a "seriously alarming" figure that qualifies as a "national emergency."

The rights watchdog said that analysis of the latest figures released by both companies established that Anglo-Dutch Shell reported 204 spills last year, while the Italian major ENI admitted 349. 

Human rights activists and journalists are increasingly being targeted by the regime of Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, a rights group said in a report Thursday, days after two activists were arrested in Africa's second-largest oil producer.

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) who published the report along with an Angolan rights group AJPD, accused the government of resorting to harassment and intimidation to tackle any opposition.

Al-Mustaqbal movement and Hizbullah on Wednesday declared that dialogue is an “essential pillar” for protecting Lebanon, following days of verbal escalation between the two parties.

“The conferees emphasized the seriousness of dialogue, seeing as it is an essential pillar to preserve Lebanon's stability and protect it from what is happening in the region,” the two parties said in a joint statement issued after their eighth dialogue session in Ain al-Tineh.