By AFPHamas paraded five Israeli hostages, some looking dazed and others elated, before cheering crowds at two meticulously recorded ceremonies in the Gaza Strip on Saturday.In the first well-rehearsed morning ceremony in Rafah, Hamas fighters stood...

By AFP/Pam CASTROResidents in a central Manila neighbourhood lined up Wednesday, as dengue cases spike nationwide, to collect a bounty -- one peso for every five mosquitoes, dead or alive.Carlito Cernal, village captain in Addition Hills, said the aw...

By AFP/Ramin KHANIZADEHIran has charged detained British couple Craig and Lindsay Foreman with espionage, accusing them of collaborating with Western intelligence services, the judiciary said Tuesday.The British foreign ministry said it was "deeply c...

By AFP/Dylan GAMBAEphrem Minassie's voice trembled as he recalled his stints in Eritrean prisons for trying to evade military service and flee the country.He was first arrested in 2001 for daring to complain about his experiences as a soldier in the...

By AFPIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the army to step up its operations in the occupied West Bank on Friday as he paid a rare visit to troops in the territory that drew Palestinian condemnation.Netanyahu's visit to Tulkarem refugee...

By AFPSyria would need more than 50 years to get back to its economic level before its devastating civil war at current growth rates, the United Nations said Thursday."Fourteen years of conflict in Syria have undone nearly four decades of economic, s...

By AFPThe British army apologised on Thursday after a coroner condemned its handling of a sexual assault complaint made by a young woman soldier who later died by suicide.Royal Artillery Gunner Jaysley Beck, 19, was found dead in her Larkhill Camp ba...

By AFPSwitzerland acknowledged Thursday that the past forced removal of children from the nomadic Yenish and Sinti communities amounted to a "crime against humanity".It is the first time that Switzerland has made such an acknowledgement, with interio...

By AFP/Boureima HAMALess than a third of Niger's vast territory has internet access, so the west African country is betting on satellite broadband to bridge the digital divide in remote rural areas.The patchy coverage is mostly down to a lack of inve...

By AFPEcuador's president admitted Tuesday that cartels and gangs move $30 billion worth of drugs, arms and other illicit goods through his country a year -- about a quarter of the country's GDP.In a bid to underscore the severity of the once peacefu...

By AFP/Benjamin LEGENDREThe world's biggest nature conservation conference resumes in Rome next week for an urgent attempt at overcoming a deadlock between northern and southern countries over funding for nature protection.Countries meeting at the UN...

By AFPA French court on Thursday postponed a much-awaited decision on freeing pro-Palestinian Lebanese resistance fighter Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, jailed 40 years ago for the 1982 killings of two foreign diplomats.The Paris appeals court, which had...