MORONI, Comoros – Despite a fractured collarbone, a teenage girl clung to the wreckage of a plane for more than 13 hours before rescuers found her floating in the Indian Ocean, authorities said. The only known survivor of the crash, she was being flown back to Paris on Wednesday night. The Yemenia Airbus 310 jet was carrying 153 people when it went down in howling winds early Tuesday in the sea north of the Comoros Islands. French officials late Wednesday retracted claims that one of the plane's black boxes had been found. French ...

By Lila Thadani The British parliament remains a lively place as it has many interesting mavericks.  Unlike them, our eccentric parliamentarians are self righteous, lack a sense of humor and are sadly very shallow. You guessed it, they are the two Khans: Asghar and Imran.  Asghar can be forgiven for his good deed of having sired the late Omar Asghar Khan.  He, though, hasn’t been punished enough for inviting the army to overthrow Bhutto and inflicting Zia on this country, which only a mighty mango crate could push aside.  The curse of that dictator lives on in the form of the Talibs ...

PRETORIA :South Africa's new President Jacob Zuma on Saturday vowed to follow Nelson Mandela's legacy of reconciliation in an inaugural speech aiming to bridge divisions in the country. "He made reconciliation the central theme of his term of office. We will not deviate from that nation building task. Thank you Mandiba for showing us the way," Zuma said, affectionately referring to Mandela by his clan name. "He taught us that all South Africans have equal claim to this country and that there can be no lasting peace unless all of us, black ...

An estimated 35 to 40percent children of school going age are out of school or cannot access schooling. At the same time the economic crunch, ongoing war on terror and education under attack foresees increase in child labour which already ranges between 10 and 12 million mark. Almost 30percent children under the age of five are malnourished and Pakistan has one of the highest rate of infant mortality at 73/1000 birth in South Asia while as much as 9,000 to 10,000 child offenders are in criminal litigation, according to the press release issued by the Society for the Protection of ...

SRINAGAR: A bomb blast in Indian-held Kashmir killed five people and injured seven, as the Muslim-majority region braced for the second stage of general elections, police said Wednesday. The attack occurred in southern Poonch district Tuesday evening near a pick-up truck carrying civilians and village defence committee (VDC) members, a police spokesman said. "Five people, including three VDC members, were killed in the explosion and seven others were seriously hurt," a police spokesman said. The committees were set up in the mid-1990s by the government to protect remote and inaccessible villages from attacks by ...

Country of northern Europe that occupies the western half of the Scandinavian peninsula.  With the Barents Sea to the north, the Norwegian Sea and the North Sea to the west, and Skagerrak to the south. About two-thirds of Norway is mountainous. Norway owes its warmer climate. Norway has land borders only to the east—with Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The mean annual temperature on the west coast is 7 °C to 30 °C .Oslo is the capital of this country. For many years Oslo has attracted settlers from throughout the country, becoming a national ...