The UK scientist at the center of a controversy surrounding e-mails leaked from a leading UK climate research unit has admitted the strain of the affair led him to consider suicide.

The suicide bomber who killed eight people at a U.S. base in Afghanistan last week was a loner since childhood, his mother told CNN on Thursday.

Pope John Paul II was a step closer to sainthood Saturday after Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree recognizing the late pontiff’s “heroic virtues” and declaring him “venerable,” the Vatican said.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi denied Thursday that payments to the Taliban in Afghanistan were authorized to protect Italian soldiers deployed there.

Philippines police say that at least two people who were at the scene of last month’s massacre in the country’s south have implicated a mayor as being involved in the killings, state media reported Thursday.

A British oil rig is due to start drilling off the Falkland Islands in a move likely to stoke further tensions between Argentina and the UK over the disputed South Atlantic territory.

An Italian jury has begun deliberations in the trial of U.S. student Amanda Knox, above right, and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. Both are charged in the killing of Meredith Kercher.

The death of a British soldier on an explosives-clearing operation in Afghanistan has pushed the British death toll there past that of the 1982 Falklands War, the Ministry of Defence announced Tuesday.

The death toll from an explosion at a northeastern China coal mine rose to 87 early Sunday, state-run media reported. Another 21 workers were still trapped underground at the mine.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani made a U-turn Saturday — first declaring that the military offensive against Islamic militants in South Waziristan had ended, then saying there is no timeframe for its completion.

It’s after 7 p.m. at Next Media’s offices in Taipei, and the day’s news starts coming to life: Artists lift details from news photos while actors in motion sensor suits re-create action sequences of stories making headlines. Animators graft cartoon avatars to the live-motion action, and the stories hit the Web.

A police informant testified in court on Monday that 11 suspected Islamic militants on trial planned to attack Barcelona’s metro last year with suicide bombers, who were to include the informant himself.

Al-Shabaab, a hard-line Somali rebel group that is on the U.S. government’s terror watch list, has threatened to attack neighboring Kenya, according to an online audio recording.

When we requested an interview with members of the Communist Youth League, I expected an army of suits with well-rehearsed answers. Instead, we met three students casually dressed in jeans, just 18 to 23 years old.

North Korea announced Tuesday that it is holding an American who illegally entered the country on Christmas Eve, possibly a Korean-American missionary who told relatives he was trying to sneak into the isolated communist state.

“Mao is very great and famous, and he saved the whole of China,” exclaims an 18-year-old woman from Wuhan in Hubei province. “Both young people and old people love Mao very much!”