Couple detained after India security alert

A male passenger and his wife were detained for questioning Sunday after a Dubai-bound flight from Mumbai, India was called back before take-off because of a security scare, the airline said.

Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing that killed CIA operatives at a U.S. base in Afghanistan, a statement on Islamist Web sites said.

Polls opened Sunday for the second round of Ukraine’s presidential elections — a bitter battle between a populist prime minister and the man she once helped oust.

Life is slowly getting back to normal at the women’s campus of Islamabad’s International Islamic University.

A suicide car bomber struck a congested traffic circle outside Peshawar Tuesday, killing at least 26 people — including several women and children — and wounding 60 others, police and hospital officials said.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday the next 18 months will be “critical” in the war in that country.

Kenyan police have confirmed to CNN that a search is currently underway for 12 Eritrean soccer players who failed to return home after competing in a regional tournament held in Nairobi.

China has threatened to slap sanctions on American companies that sell arms to its rival Taiwan as part of a range of punitive actions Beijing is taking to protest the deal.

Rescue workers pulled a woman out of rubble near Haiti’s national cathedral Tuesday, a week after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck.

Areas of Cairo might as well be under martial law. This normally chaotic but otherwise peaceful city of 18 million has been wracked by football fever gone mad. The government has deployed thousands of riot police and plain-clothed cops in a part of town normally known for its fancy restaurants and upscale shops.

An area that now looks like a flattened mess of destruction was, just days ago, a group of three villages.

Flooding and landslides from tropical depression Parma have killed 186 people in the Philippines, authorities said Saturday. Some 35,000 people have fled to evacuation centers, the official Philippines News Agency reported.

Five British soldiers have been shot and killed in an attack in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, the British Ministry of Defense said Wednesday.

Belgian authorities were holding a crisis meeting Tuesday morning in the aftermath of a commuter train crash near Brussels that left 18 people dead and more than 160 injured.

Nearly 90 professors at Iran’s oldest and largest university signed a letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticizing the government’s violent handling of student protesters.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has declared a state of national calamity because so many citizens do not have food or proper nutrition. Chronic malnutrition affects about half of the nation’s children under the age of 5, the U.N. World Food Programme said.