World

Sicilian prosecutors said Saturday they were investigating possible manslaughter after a superyacht sank killing seven people, as it emerged that trapped passengers scrambled for air pockets after it went down.

UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, four friends and the yacht's cook died when the British-flagged Bayesian sank in a storm before dawn on Monday.

The United States unveiled sweeping sanctions Friday against almost 400 individuals and companies tied to Russia's war in Ukraine, expanding existing measures to curb Moscow over the invasion of its neighbor.

The moves announced by the US Treasury, State and Commerce departments come as fighting has stretched well into its third year.

The detention in Greenland of anti-whaling campaigner Paul Watson pending possible extradition to Japan has turned the spotlight on the widely condemned practice of hunting whales.

A 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling allowed numbers to recover following centuries of hunting that decimated the population to near-extinction.

The United States along with countries in Europe and Latin America on Friday rejected the certification by Venezuela's Supreme Court of strongman Nicolas Maduro's widely questioned presidential reelection.

Washington, which has sanctions in place against Maduro's regime, said through State Department spokesman Vedant Patel that the ruling "lacks all credibility," while Spain and Mexico continued to insist on a detailed breakdown of voting results.

In the sweltering heat of India's Thar desert, where summer highs soar above 50 degrees Celsius, an architecturally striking school is an oasis of cool thanks to a combination of age-old techniques and modern design.

The Rajkumari Ratnavati girls' school uses the same yellow sandstone as the 12th-century fort in nearby Jaisalmer, in India's western state of Rajasthan, dubbed the "golden city" due to the colour of the rock.

Flash floods wrought havoc in Bangladesh on Friday as the country recovers from weeks of political upheaval, with the death toll rising to 13 and millions more caught in the deluge.

The South Asian nation of 170 million people, crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, has seen frequent floods in recent decades.

Icelandic authorities said Friday that a second fissure had formed on the southwestern Reykjanes peninsula after lava started spewing forth for the sixth time in the region since December.

After weeks of warnings, the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) said Thursday that a new eruption had started at 9:26 pm (2126 GMT) that evening, following a series of earthquakes.

Apple will allow iPhone and iPad users in the European Union delete the App Store or its Safari browser, the tech giant told developers on Thursday.

Apple had long fiercely protected the App Store as the lone gateway for digital content to get onto its popular mobile devices. The change comes as the company loosens its grip on devices in the EU due to the bloc's landmark new digital rules.

Canadian mining company Lucara Diamond said in a statement Wednesday that it had discovered in Botswana a diamond as large as the palm of a hand, which, in terms of carats, would make it the world's second-largest diamond.

A massive 2,492-carat diamond -- the second largest in the world -- has been discovered in Botswana, the Canadian mining company that found the stone announced Thursday.