A US engineer who helped install reactors at Fukushima, speaking anonymously, said he believes the radioactive core in reactor Number 2 may have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor.
Defected Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa may bear responsibility in the Lockerbie bombing—and in countless “disappearances” and rights abuses. Will he now be embraced as the technocratic face of a new regime?
The White House and Paris both publicly broached arming the Libyan rebels as Moammar Qaddafi’s forces pushed the insurgent army back in a sweep to the east—despite ongoing Allied air-strikes.
Israel’s Knesset passed a law enabling the courts to revoke the citizenship of anyone convicted of terrorism, espionage or treason. Tel Aviv also pressured Facebook to shut down a page calling for a Third Intifada.
Security forces stormed the provincial council building in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit on March 29 after an hours-long shootout with gunmen that left 41 dead and 95 wounded. The gunmen, wearing military uniforms and suicide vests, swarmed into the… Read moreIraq: 40 killed in Tikrit attack
In a long-awaited public address, President Bashar Assad blamed foreign conspiracies for Syria’s unrest, while calling hundreds of thousands of his supporters to the streets in a massive show of force.
Hundreds of thousands again took to the streets in Yemen to demand the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, as protesters charged official complicity in a deadly blast at a munitions plant that authorities blamed on al-Qaeda.
The number of displaced Haitians living in camps in the Port-au-Prince area after the January 2010 earthquake has now fallen to about 680,000. But those who left the camps haven’t necessarily found better shelter.
Honduran riot police threw a tear gas canister at journalists Lidieth Díaz and Adolfo Sierra from TV Cholusat Sur (Channel 36) as they were trying to film a protest by striking teachers.
Over 41,000 Colombian judicial workers demonstrated in downtown Bogotá to protest the murders of judicial officers. The protest was called after the murder of Judge Gloria Constanza Gaona.
Some 115,000 Mexicans fled their homes last year because of drug-related crime, and the total number of people displaced by drug violence in Mexico since 2007 has reached about 230,000.
Activists for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia decried the regime’s decision to keep a voting ban in place at a time when Arab governments are taking steps to avert pro-democracy uprisings.
