Hurricane Sandy Leaves Death, Damp And Darkness In Wake

As Superstorm Sandy churned slowly inland, millions along the U.S. East Coast awoke Tuesday without power or mass transit, and huge swaths of New York City were unusually dark and abandoned. At least 17 people were killed in seven states. The storm that made landfall in New Jersey on Monday evening with 130 km/h sustained winds cut power to more than 6 million homes and businesses from the Carolinas to Ohio and put the presidential campaign on hold one week before Election Day. Photos of Superstorm...

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Pope Acknowledges Bad Fish In Church

Pope Benedict urged lapsed and lukewarm Roman Catholics on Thursday to rediscover their faith but acknowledged there are "bad fish" in the Church itself.The pope made his comments at two large events before thousands of people in St. Peter's Square on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, a far-reaching event in the Church's 2,000-year history."Recent decades have seen the advance of a spiritual desertification," he said in his sermon of a morning Mass, opening a...

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Nigeria President Declares Floods A National Disaster

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan on Thursday visited some of the hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by the country's worst flooding in at least five decades, calling it a 'national disaster'.Vast stretches of Africa's most populous nation have been submerged by floods in the past few weeks, as major rivers like the Niger, the continent's third longest, burst their banks. At least 140 people have been killed, hundreds of thousands uprooted and tens of thousands of hectares of farmland...

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In Humble Home, Guatemala Farmer Finds Ancient Maya Murals Under Plaster

In a ramshackle home in Guatemala's rural highlands, farmer and odd job man Lucas Asicona made for an unlikely guardian of ancient Mayan treasures--until he decided to redo his kitchen.When he pulled back the plaster in his humble colonial-era home of stone, adobe and haphazard wooden boards, he discovered 300-year-old murals, a priceless piece of Guatemalan history. Scenes of tall Europeans beating drums and playing flutes stare out over the one-room dwelling where his family including five...

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Turkey Steps Up Syria Strikes, Says Will Defend Borders

Turkey stepped up retaliatory artillery strikes on a Syrian border town on Thursday, killing several Syrian soldiers, while its parliament approved further military action in the event of another spillover of the Syrian conflict.Seeking to unwind the most serious cross-border escalation in its 18-month-old crackdown on dissent, Damascus apologised through the United Nations for shelling which killed five civilians in southeast Turkey on Wednesday and said it would not happen again, Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay said.Syria's staunch...

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19 Students Confirmed Dead After Chinese Landslide

All 18 elementary school students buried in a landslide were confirmed dead Friday, while one other person also died after a hillside collapsed and smothered part of a village in mountainous southwestern China.The Tiantou Elementary School was buried Thursday when the hillside collapsed in Zhenhe, a village in Yunnan province, the Yiliang County government said on its website.All 18 students who were buried in the school were confirmed dead, the government said. The official Xinhua News Agency...

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