Heavy rains across the region during the past week, combined with a wet spring, prompted the flooding and swelling of the Elbe and Danube rivers. High waters have receded in parts of Austria and the Czech Republic, but the swollen rivers are inundating Germany and Hungary downstream.
Tens of thousands evacuated due to floods in Germany and Hungary
Air polluters like to send their emissions across state lines
If you near a state line, you might be getting an unusually heavy dose of pollution from your neighbors across the border.
That’s the conclusion of a working paper by political scientists James Monogan, David Konisky and Neal Woods. They report that air polluting facilities in the United States are disproportionately likely to be located near downwind borders. When the breeze picks up, noxious emissions are hustled out of state and become someone else’s problem.
Israeli PM says no to international troops
Israel cannot rely on international forces for its security, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said during Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
The prime minister referred to the decision by the United Nations peacekeeping forces in the Golan Heights Thursday to pull out 380 Austrian troops from the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force on the Syrian-Israeli border, following the fierce fighting between pro-Syrian regime army forces and rebel forces in Quneitra, The Jerusalem Post said.
Inside the Global Industry That's Slaughtering Africa's Elephants
Destruction and Death, as Pope Francis offered this homily in St. Peter's Square, had just left the scene in the central African nation of Chad, where in a single night in mid-March 89 elephants were slaughtered for their tusks.
Reports described the ivory poachers as 50 or so men on camel and horseback, speaking Arabic, armed with AK-47s, and presumed to be the same band that came over from Sudan last year to execute more than 450 elephants in Cameroon -- on that foray, dispatching their victims with rocket-propelled grenades.
Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data
The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.
Nelson Mandela admitted to hospital in 'serious condition'
Former President Nelson Mandela has been admitted to hospital in South Africa with a lung infection. A presidential spokesman said he is in a "serious but stable condition", although he was able to breathe on his own - a "positive sign".
Mr Mandela, 94, has been ill for some days but deteriorated overnight and was transferred to a hospital in Pretoria.
Army fires Japan commander over sexual assault case
The Army fired its top commander in Japan on Friday over charges that he “failed in his duties as commander to report or properly investigate an allegation of sexual assault.”
Maj. Gen. Michael Harrison, head of U.S. Army Japan, is the latest top military commander relieved as the military services deal with pressure from Congress to crack down on sexual assault.
Afghan 'insider attack' kills Americans in Paktika
Two US soldiers and an American civilian have been killed in a possible insider attack in eastern Afghanistan, the Nato-led force says. A man wearing Afghan army uniform was said to have opened fire on them in Paktika province, close to the border with Pakistan,
Isaf forces have taken a series of measures to try to halt such attacks. An Italian soldier died in a separate attack in Farah province in the west of the country, Italian officials said.
Few options for companies to defy intelligence demands
Internet companies that want to resist government demands to hand over customer data for intelligence investigations have few legal options, due to the classified nature of such probes and a court review process shrouded in secrecy.
Google Inc, Facebook Inc and Microsoft Corp are among the big U.S. technology companies that were outed this week as key sources of data for the National Security Agency (NSA), under a surveillance program referred to inside the spy agency as Prism.
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