Scott Neuman

Updated at 5:50 p.m. ET

The European Union has agreed to more ships, planes and helicopters to patrol the Mediterranean in hopes of stopping migrants from Africa and the Middle East and stopping people smugglers who facilitate them.

At an emergency summit in Brussels, Britain pledged three ships, while Germany ...

Welcome back, Bouvier's red colobus monkey. It's been a while.

The African primate hasn't been seen since the 1970s and was assumed to have become extinct.

But, in a statement released late last week, the Wildlife Conservation Society says two primatologists working in the forests of the Republic of ...

Twenty years ago today, Timothy McVeigh — an Army veteran with strong anti-government views — drove a rental truck containing a massive homemade bomb up to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, lit the fuse and walked away.

The result was the worst ...

The Shroud of Turin, an artifact that many people believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, goes back on public display today for the first time in five years in the Italian city that bears its name.

The shroud can be seen by the public until ...

The self-declared Islamic State has released a new video purporting to show its followers shooting or beheading some 30 Ethiopian Christians in two separate locations in Libya, as a masked man dressed in black issues a stark warning to the West.

Reuters says of the video, reported by the

Hundreds of would-be migrants from North Africa who were trying to reach Europe are missing and feared drowned after their boat capsized about 120 miles south of the Italian island of Lampedusa. Officials say it could be the largest-ever such tragedy on the Mediterranean.

Officials engaged in a major air-and-sea ...

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed a law today allowing nitrogen to be used in executions in the state in case lethal injection is ruled unconstitutional or the drugs are not available.

Oklahoma is the first state to approve such a method. It would involve placing a mask over an inmate's ...

Call it Darwinian evolution in action: A troop of wild chimpanzees in Uganda has learned a valuable survival skill — to look before crossing.

In a video published by New Scientist, one chimp can be seen pausing at the edge of the road and then backtracking to retrieve a ...

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced in the fighting in Yemen, the United Nations says today in a new report, which warns that the figure could rise dramatically unless the conflict is ended.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says the number of displaced persons ...

Messenger, the space probe that discovered water on Mercury and has been circling the planet for four years, will take a swan dive at the end of the month in hopes of discovering something about weathering on the surface.

Messenger (an acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and ...

Iraqi forces claim to have killed Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who served in Saddam Hussein's leadership circle and is believed to have been instrumental in the sudden rise of the self-declared Islamic State.

But an official from Saddam's Baath Party has denied the report.

Douri, 72, is the "king of clubs" ...

Pope Francis, who plans to visit the United States in September, might tack onto his itinerary a side trip to Cuba, the Vatican says, but it cautions the talks with Havana are at an early stage.

The Catholic Herald quotes Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi as saying Francis is "considering ...

Updated at 10:15 a.m. ET

If there's one piece of hardware that can be found on nearly every trader's desk, regardless of time zone, it's the Bloomberg data terminal.

So when the terminals experienced a global outage lasting hours, it sent chaos through markets where the "screens" are relied upon ...

Has life gotten you down?

Do things seem hard or tough?

We might have just the antidote: Stephen Hawking covering Monty Python's "Galaxy Song."

The famous physicist and pop icon has lent his electronic voice to a new video for the ditty, written by Eric Idle and made famous ...

Updated at 12:50 p.m. ET

Australia has announced plans to halt welfare payments and child care rebates to families that refuse to have their children vaccinated — an aggressive move aimed at clamping down on a rising number of parents who opt out of immunizations.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott said ...

Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET

Pope Francis today touched off a diplomatic dispute between the Turkey and the Holy See when he referred to the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I as "genocide."

That view, long disputed by Turkey, caused Ankara to summon the Vatican ...

A "precautionary lockdown" of the U.S. Capitol and Capitol Visitor Center has been lifted today after a shot was fired in an apparent suicide, according to police.

"The suspected shooter has been neutralized but the U.S. Capitol Building has been locked down as a precautionary measure," Capitol Police spokeswoman Kimberly ...

A piece of a commercial fishing boat that was ripped from Japan's coast by the March 11, 2011 tsunami has turned up on near Oregon four years later, carrying a small diaspora of live yellowtail jack fish, native to east Asian waters, according to state park officials.

The ...

Updated at 12:30 p.m. ET

An Egyptian court has sentenced an American, Mohamed Soltan, to life in prison for having ties to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, as the court also handed down a fourth death sentence on the leader of the Islamist group that was ousted from power in a ...

A car bomb in Thailand's tourist island of Samui wounded seven people in an attack that authorities have suggested is linked to activists opposed to the country's junta.

Michael Sullivan, reporting for NPR from Bangkok, says the seven were injured in the explosion that rocked the island in the Gulf ...