Crimea declared a state of emergency on Sunday after its main electricity lines from Ukraine were blown up, leaving the Russian-annexed peninsula in darkness after the second such attack in as many days.

More than 1.6 million people are without power, water supplies to high-rise buildings have stopped and cable and mobile Internet is down.

The brother of wanted Paris terror suspect Salah Abdeslam said Sunday he believed he decided at the very last moment not to go through with an attack.

Belgium has launched a huge manhunt for the 26-year-old who is believed to be the only surviving member of the gang of jihadists behind the massacre in the French capital.

Afghan Taliban militants on Saturday kidnapped at least seven members of the minority Shiite Hazara community after a dispute over sheep, local authorities said.

Gunmen stopped three buses at dawn between Shah Joy and Qalat in the volatile Zabul province, first taking 17 hostages before releasing nine, local leader Wazir Mohammed Jawadi said.

U.S. President Barack Obama called Sunday for resolve in the face of heightened jihadist threats, insisting panicked citizens must not succumb to fear and urging world leaders not to abandon a climate summit in Paris.

With Brussels in lockdown, cities from Beirut to Bamako reeling from attacks, and Americans jittery that they too may come under assault, Obama said the world must show steel.

Switzerland has active criminal proceedings against 33 individuals over suspected ties to extremist Islamist groups, but only three people are currently in custody, the attorney general's office said Sunday.

Some of those cases have been opened in the last two to three months, but the most serious involves a cell of possible Islamist radicals uncovered in the Canton of Schaffhausen last year, said Andry Marty, a spokesman for Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Sunday that a chemical or biological attack "was among the risks" in the wake of the Paris attacks but that all possible precautions to avoid such a scenario had been taken.

He said French authorities were not ruling anything out in the wake of the Paris attacks even though it was "very complicated" for anyone to use chemical weapons.

Russia said Sunday its security forces had killed 14 fighters linked to the Islamic State jihadist group in two special anti-terror operations in the volatile North Caucasus region.

Russia's national anti-terrorism committee said in a statement quoted by TASS news agency that 11 "bandits" were killed in a first raid near the city of Nalchik. Three others died in a second operation in the same area later in the day.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police says it is investigating a bomb threat that caused a Turkish Airlines flight from New York City to Istanbul to divert and land in Canada.

Halifax Stanfield International Airport said on its Twitter feed early Sunday that Flight 2 had landed safely and that police were at the scene.

Around 100 people have died in a huge landslide in a remote jade mining area of northern Myanmar, officials said Sunday, as search teams continued to find bodies in one of the deadliest disasters to strike the country's shadowy jade industry.

Those killed were thought to have been mainly itinerant miners, who scratch a living scavenging through mountains of waste rubble dumped by mechanical diggers used by mining firms at the center of a secretive multi-billion dollar jade industry in war-torn Kachin state.

Japan on Sunday backed the United States sailing warships close to disputed land in the South China Sea but said it had no plans to send its own maritime forces to support the operation.

Last month Washington infuriated Beijing when the USS Lassen guided missile destroyer sailed within 12 nautical miles of at least one land formation claimed by China in the disputed Spratly Islands chain.