Orla Guerin reporting in Cairo: ”The target is very high profile” Five people have been killed and nearly 70 wounded after three blasts in the Egyptian capital that appeared to target the police force. The attacks began with a powerful car bomb that exploded outside the police headquarters in central Cairo, killing four people and wounding 51. Within hours, two other blasts occurred elsewhere in the city, killing one person […]

Is Step into the Void, a new 12,650-foot (3,856-meter) perch in the French Alps, the scariest? A person stands in the ‘Step into the Void’ installation in the French Alps. “I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forests, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside me to frighten me,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau of his love of rambling in the French Alps. “The odd thing about my liking […]

There has been a “significant” fall in unemployment, says Nick Palmer from the Office for National Statistics The UK unemployment rate has dropped to 7.1%, close to the point at which the Bank of England has said it will consider raising interest rates. The number of people out of work fell by 167,000 to 2.32 million in the three months to November, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. The […]

Executions were rarely carried out in India, but in the last two years, India has carried out two hangings India’s Supreme Court has commuted the sentences of 15 death row prisoners to life in jail on the grounds of delay. Those affected include three men convicted of killing former PM Rajiv Gandhi, and four associates of the notorious bandit Veerappan. Campaigners have welcomed the ruling, saying it will impose new […]

Leaked pictures ‘show evidence of starvation, beatings and strangulation’ There is clear evidence that Syria has systematically tortured and executed about 11,000 detainees since the start of the uprising, a report by three former war crimes prosecutors says. The investigators examined thousands of still images of dead prisoners reportedly smuggled out by a defector. The report says the evidence implicates “agents of the Syrian governments”. Damascus has denied claims of […]

Indian minister Shashi Tharoor, whose wife was found dead in a Delhi hotel room on Friday, has called for a swift investigation so that the truth “emerges at the earliest”. He has appeared before a magistrate probing the death of Sunanda Pushkar. An autopsy found “injury marks” on Ms Pushkar’s body, but did not say if they were linked to her death. The couple became embroiled in a row on […]

Press reports about the French president’s complicated love life highlight the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Gallic attitudes towards sex, adultery, but above all appetite, writes Adam Gopnik. Whenever a French man of state has sex with someone not his wife, people call me up and ask why he did it. When I say people do, I really mean journalists (a sub-species whose personhood is sometimes in doubt) and I suppose […]

The Carretera Austral could be one of the most spectacular and challenging cycle tours in the world. It is made of endless stretches of empty dirt roads surrounded by forests, mountains, glaciers and lakes, with scenic villages, free campsites and hot springs along the way. The route is so remote that some days you might only see a jinete (horseman) trot by with his band of dogs. But the journey […]

  STORY HIGHLIGHTS Number of female recruits training to be bodyguards on the rise Female bodyguards are in demand among China’s elite Women said to blend in better than male bodyguards The training is extremely tough and some students quit Yang Donglan has had an unusual career trajectory. The 22-year-old once made a living selling cosmetics, but a year ago she switched her make-up brushes for nunchucks, undergoing a grueling […]

  A senior IMF official and four UN employees were among 21 people killed in a suicide bomb and gun attack on a restaurant in Kabul, officials say. Wabel Abdallah, the head of the IMF’s Afghanistan office, and the UN civilian staff died in what UN chief Ban Ki-moon said was a “horrific attack”. Canadians, Lebanese and a Briton were among the 13 foreign victims; the other eight were Afghans. […]