LONDON (AFP) ― Britain’s biggest cosmetic surgery chain has revealed that rupture rates on allegedly faulty French-made breast implants are seven times higher than previously thought, a report said Sunday.The new data from Transform, reported in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, has prompted Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to order an urgent review into the data used to assess the risks to 42,000 British women given the implants. The firm’s figures suggest one in 14 implants made by French manufac

NEW YORK (AP) ― For the first time, the top export of the United States, the world’s biggest gas guzzler, is ― wait for it ― fuel. Measured in dollars, the nation is on pace this year to ship more gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel than any other single export, according to U.S. Census data going back to 1990. It will also be the first year in more than 60 that America has been a net exporter of these fuels.Just how big of a shift is this? A decade ago, fuel wasn’t even among the top 25 exports. And

KABUL (AFP) ― An Afghan child bride Saturday spoke of how she was tortured by her mother-in-law who locked her in a toilet for six months, beat her, pulled out her fingernails and burned her with cigarettes.Sahar Gul, 15, is recovering in hospital in Kabul, her face bruised and swollen, her skin still bearing the marks of her ordeal, barely able to speak.Police have said she was locked up when she defied her in-laws who tried to force her into prostitution. Her brother had sold her to her husban

BEIRUT (AP) ― Syria’s two largest opposition groups signed an agreement on setting up a democracy if President Bashar Assad’s autocratic regime falls, opposition figures said Saturday.The move is so far the most serious by the fractured opposition to unite against the regime and shows that Assad’s opponents will accept nothing less than his departure from power.Burhan Ghalioun, leader of the Syrian National Council, and Haytham Manna of the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syr

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) -- Five new countries on Sunday join a U.N. Security Council driven by one of the biggest international splits in years on how to handle the Arab Spring uprisings.Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Morocco, Pakistan and Togo start two year terms on the council which has been wounded by air strikes in Libya and is battling over President Bashar Assad’s deadly crackdown in Syria. Growing tensions around Iran add to the nerves on the 15-member body.“It is like the Cold War,” said one Weste

TEHRAN (AP) ― Talk of blocking the strategic oil route through the Strait of Hormuz is a discussion of the past, a commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Saturday in comments that seemed to back away from an earlier threat. But he said Iran had other, unspecified strategies for reacting to any Western aggression.“Discourse about closing the Strait of Hormuz belongs to five years ago. Today’s debate in the Islamic Republic of Iran contains new layers and the time has not come to raise it,”

BEIJING (AFP) ― A bus driver in southern China who contracted the bird flu virus died Saturday, health authorities said, in the nation’s first reported human case of the deadly disease in 18 months.The man, surnamed Chen, died in Shenzhen ― a boomtown that borders Hong Kong where thousands of chickens have already been culled after three birds tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus in mid-December.He developed a fever on Dec. 21 and was taken to hospital four days later, and diagnose