Thailand's Ministry of Foreign affairs on Thursday recalled the Thai envoy to Phnom Penh, in its first step of retaliation to Cambodia after it has appointed convicted former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra as perso...

Sorry won't cut it...

   Tom Jacobs, public information officer for the Department of Motor Vehicles, shows a sample of the Gold Star plates that will become available Monday for families of servicemen killed in the line of the duty Nevada Appeal Gov. Jim Gibbo...

A South African jewelry firm was surprised to find that one of their own staff had been stuffing a cooked chicken with gold and precious metal in an attempt to steal the goods. Carrying the cooked chicken out of the building on his way home, the man was stopped at the metal detector with chicken in hand. This is when security officials discovered that instead of being stuffed with sage and onion, the chicken had been stuffed with expensive jewelry.

Rare, heavy rainstorms soaked pilgrims and flooded the road into Mecca, snarling Islam’s annual hajj as millions of Muslims headed for the holy sites. The downpours add an extra hazard on top of intense concerns about the spread of swine flu. Pilgrims in white robes porting umbrellas, some wearing face masks for fear of the flu, circled the black cube-shaped Kaaba in Mecca, the opening rite for the hajj. But the shrine, Islam’s holiest site and the nearby, rain-soaked streets did not see the usual massive crowds, because many tried to stay inside nearby hotels or were caught up in the traffic jams heading into the city.

Eleno Oviedo, imprisoned in Cuba for 26 years, stood outside a Sedano's in Hialeah on a recent Saturday, eager to collect donations for a fresh cause: Honduras. "We set up a table and had some signs and asked people to give what they could," said Oviedo, 73, co-director of Plantados, a group of one-time political prisoners from Cuba. Oviedo is among groups of local Cubans seeking to help Honduras as the country tries to recover from political upheaval following the ouster of President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya and the global shunning of the government.

Thomas Tomczyk is serious about motorcycles. He's done three motorcycle trips across India, from the steamy southern tip all the way up to the frozen highlands of Ladakh. Now he's starting his childhood dream--an epic trip 12,500 miles (20,000 km) across Africa. His zigzag tour will take in 22 African nations including South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, the Saharawi Republic, and Morocco. . .

Walking along a rushing stream in Hsinchu, Hilda Chu balanced an umbrella in one hand and textbooks in the other. Her skin was ghostly white. “I try hard to make my skin white,” said Chu, 18, a student at National Tsing Hua University. “If my skin is lighter, I will be happier because I think I look good. It makes my emotion better, yes.” She's hardly alone. Asians spend an estimated $18 billion a year to appear pale. “Asians like white skin," said Dr. Hsieh Ya Ju, a dermatologist at MacKay Memorial Hospital in Hsingchu, who sees about 25 patients a day. Outside Hsieh’s office, four middle-aged chalky-skinned women sat patiently awaiting treatments that cost $300 to $500 per session.

Many children in orphanages throughout the developing world have at least one parent who is alive, a charity claimed yesterday. According to research by Save the Children, 98% of children in residential care in central and eastern Europe, 94% of tho...

There’s a lot of busy airports around the country today, but hopefully you’ve already made your way through the terminal and are reading this thanks to free in-flight WiFi. If that’s not the case, here’s a few places to relax within some of the nation’s busiest airports. · LaGuardia Airport - New York City: The airports in New York are always stressful; after all, they are full of New Yorkers trying to get out of town. If the weather or air traffic has you stuck for a few, take a moment to relax at the Fox Sports Bar and Restaurant in the Delta Terminal.

Daredevil inventor and pilot Yves Rossy has crashed into the ocean after trying to fly from Africa to Europe with a winged 150mph jetpack. It is thought a malfunction with his jet wing caused Rossy - dubbed Rocket Man - to crash land in the Straits of Gibraltar shortly after his launch.

Tourism entrepreneurs in Nepali western Pokhara have urged tourists not to go on trekking alone, following a series of robberies in different trekking routes. According to tourism entrepreneurs, about half a dozen of robbery cases have been reported on different trekking routes around Pokhara. Local media myrepulica.com reported on Tuesday that tourism entrepreneurs had organized a meeting with security officials that requested all tourists to trek in company to avoid any untoward incidents.

In a grimy cell in Kisangani prison, Joshua French, a former British soldier, sits on a plastic chair, an electric fan stirring the humid air above his head. Groups of soldiers and police with AK47s loll about outside the jail — a red-brick fortress in the heart of this bombed-out tropical city by the Congo River. Open sewers pass around the perimeter of a large courtyard lined with stinking, mosquito-ridden cells. French, 27, who has dual British and Norwegian nationality, and his friend, Tjostolv Moland, 28, a former Norwegian soldier, face death by firing squad after a military tribunal convicted them of murder and espionage in September.

It was 2am on a bleak Belgian Sunday in November when Fina Nicolaes received the news that every mother dreads. Her son Rom, 20, was in hospital in Liège with life-threatening injuries after a Saturday night car crash. The phone call that woke her up in the Flemish village of Kanne near the Dutch border was 26 years ago. Her son and the four friends in the car with him survived. But six months later, unable to move, speak or signal any kind of understanding, the second-year engineering student was written off as a vegetable, paralysed, brain-dead, awake but not aware.

Philippine authorities, under intense public pressure to make arrests in the country's worst election massacre, said Wednesday they are investigating a member of a powerful clan allied with the government along with four police commanders. Officials recovered 11 more bodies Wednesday – six in a large pit buried alongside three vehicles and five in a mass grave – bringing the death toll in Monday's attack on an election caravan to 57, including 18 journalists.

The 23-year-old ewe, recognised by the Guinness Book of Records, died peacefully on her farm at Lake Bolac, 57 miles west of Melbourne, after a short illness. Lucky’s owner Delrae Westgarth says her beloved sheep had found the recent hot weather in Victoria hard to endure. “It’s a relief,” said Mrs Westgarth. “She was good up to that first lot of heatwaves we had. But she went downhill a bit from then.” The Westgarths, who rescued Lucky as a newborn lamb after she was abandoned by her mother, recently invested in air-conditioning for their elderly pet, but even this couldn't save her.

Animal shelters in Dallas are now overwhelmed by pets, just like most animal rescues and shelters in other parts of the country. Because of financial difficulties and foreclosures, more pets are being abandoned and more families are bringing in their pets to shelters. The services center of the Animal Guardians of America in West Dallas, which took in more than 7,700 cats in 2008, no longer has space and funds for additional pets. At its website, Animal Guardians has announced that it is no longer able to accept pets....

Much of downtown Toronto came to a standstill for hours this morning as Toronto Police, animal services and an emergency task force surrounded and Tasered a wayward deer that ran through the financial district. After running past office towers and Union Station, the deer eventually took refuge on a grassy patch on the east side of a medical office building at the corner of Chestnut and Edward streets.Around 11 a.m., ETF officers moved their trucks closer to the animal, in an apparent attempt to create a barrier in which to contain it.

John Mark Felton, 45 flew to the state capital to Anchorage to have sex with a 6-year-old boy whose father was purportedly offering his children for sex. Dr Felton, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, worked in Boston as a senior research scientist at a vaccine development company Acambis. US officials said Dr Felton planned to dress the 6-year-old boy up as Spider-Man and had bought Hannah Montana toys for his sister.

A novel anti-crime surveillance program that will record the license plate number of every car entering and leaving Tiburon should be up and running within six months, officials said Thursday. The Town Council voted 4-0 late Wednesday – with Vice Mayor Miles Berger absent – to install six cameras that recognize license plate characters on Tiburon Boulevard and Paradise Drive. Those are the only two roads that feed into the Tiburon peninsula, which also includes the smaller city of Belvedere on its southwestern edge.