YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar police said Tuesday a makeshift bomb caused a blast at a luxury Yangon hotel that wounded an American woman, as they questioned several suspects following a series of explosions.Officials voiced fears that the incidents could be aimed at derailing democratic reforms as the country prepares to host a major regional sporting event in December and chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) next year.The American woman was taken to hospital with wounds to her thi

KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) - The Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday began in Iraq Tuesday with a bomb ripping through a crowd of worshippers as they left a Sunni mosque, killing 12 people.Three children, a policeman and an army officer were among the dead from the blast in the northern city of Kirkuk, which also wounded 26 people, police and a doctor said.Bodies, their clothes covered in blood, were placed in the back of a small police pickup truck to be taken away, an AFP journalist at the scene said.Angry and

Five of the six nations involved in the long-stalled talks to denuclearize North Korea may hold a meeting on the sidelines of an international cyberspace conference to be held in Seoul later this week, a foreign ministry official said Tuesday.The expected meeting will bring together government officials from South Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan, five of the six-party-talks members, except North Korea, on the sidelines of the Seoul Conference on Cyberspace 2013 to be held on Th

STOCKHOLM (AFP) - A member of the Swedish institution that awards the Nobel prize for physics publicly contested this year's award, saying the honour for two physicists should have included the CERN laboratory which proved their theories."I think it's wrong," Anders Barany, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told AFP, commenting after the decision Tuesday, which was delayed for an hour due to "a lot of discussion"."I think those experimental researchers have done incredibly fantas

The number of South Korean visitors to Japan sharply increased this year despite concerns over nuclear safety there, the state-run tourism agency said Tuesday.According to the Korea Tourism Organization, the number of South Koreans visiting the neighboring country reached 1.56 million in the first seven months of 2013, up 36.6 percent from a year earlier.The figure is the second-largest after China's 2.25 million, the organization said.The number of South Korean visitors to Japan has hovered abo

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The United States and Iran took a historic step toward ending more than three decades of estrangement on Friday when President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke by phone and agreed to work on resolving global suspicions that Tehran is trying to build a nuclear weapon.   The 15-minute call capped a week of seismic shifts in the relationship that revolved around Rouhani's participation in the annual U.N. meeting of world leaders. The night before the two lea

PARIS (AFP) - France said Wednesday its public debt would hit a record 95.1 percent of GDP in 2014, far higher than previous estimates, as it unveiled next year's draft budget for the embattled euro-zone economy.But the government said debt should fall back in 2015, and reiterated a pledge to meet its EU-mandated deadline to bring the public deficit below three percent that year.The draft budget was presented to the cabinet by Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici and Budget Minister Bernard Cazeneu

KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) - Militants attacked local government buildings in north Iraq on Wednesday with suicide bombers and mortar fire and clashed with soldiers, leaving 14 people dead, an army officer said.Seven civilians, three soldiers and four militants were killed in the violence in the town of Hawijah, west of Kirkuk, army Staff Major General Mohammed Khalaf al-Dulaimi said.One suicide bomber detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle near a police station while a second blew up another near a loc

THE HAGUE (AFP) - Dutch police closed two department stores and a restaurant in the city of Haarlem on Wednesday after someone tweeted threats of a "bloodbath.”Armed police were deployed outside V&D shops and a restaurant in the city to the west of Amsterdam after "threatening tweets" were made, police said in a statement.The tweets were made on Tuesday night saying there would be a bloodbath at a V&D shop on Wednesday at 11:50 a.m., with at least 10 dead, Dutch media reported.The author of the

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistan on Saturday released its most senior Afghan Taliban detainee, Abdul Ghani Baradar, a senior official of the interior ministry told AFP, in a move Kabul hopes will encourage peace talks with the insurgents."Yes Baradar has been released," Omar Hamid, a spokesman for interior ministry told AFP, without elaborating.Abdul Ghani Baradar, a one-time military chief often described as the insurgents' former second-in-command, was the most high profile detained Taliban commande

BEIRUT (AFP) - Syria's opposition National Coalition on Saturday rejected an Iranian offer to broker talks with the regime, saying the bid was "not serious" and calling Tehran "part of the problem.""The Iranian initiative is not serious and lacks political credibility," the key opposition grouping said in a statement.The comments came after Iranian President Hassan Rowhani said Thursday that his government was willing to "facilitate dialogue" between the Syrian government and opposition fighters