The Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt - killing 224 people - broke up in mid-air, an offical has said.

Victor Sorochenko, head of Russia's Interstate Aviation Committee, said it remains too early to say what caused the crash on Saturday.

Speaking to reporters after visiting the crash site in Sinai, Sorochenko said debris was found across a 20 square km area.

Wilayat Sinai, an Egyptian jihadist group allied to Isis, has claimed credit for the crash, saying it shot the plane out of the sky "in response to Russian airstrikes that killed hundreds of Muslims on Syrian land".

Russian transport minister Maksim Sokolov has said the claim "can't be considered accurate" while Egypt's army spokesman has also dismissed it.

Read more HERE.

Two more people died today of burns from a nightclub fire in Bucharest, a Romanian official said, raising the death toll in the horrific blaze to 29.

Forensic experts, meanwhile, began the first autopsies of victims today.

Raed Arafat, an emergency situations official, said the two had died in the hospital. They were among the 180 injured as they fled a fire and ended up in a panicked stampede Friday night toward the only door in the basement nightclub Colectiv in downtown Bucharest.

A gun-toting assailant opened fire in Colorado, shooting three people to death before officers returned fire and killed the shooter, authorities said.

Around 8:45 am (1445 GMT), the Colorado Springs Police Department had a report of shots fired in downtown Colorado Springs, said El Paso County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Jackie Kirby.

"When the suspect fired multiple shots at the officers, CSPD officers returned fire," she said. 

"We can confirm there are three victims who are deceased. And in addition to these three victims, the suspect is also deceased."

"We do not believe there is any further threat to the community," Kirby added, declining to state the shooter's gender.

None of the police officers was injured, the spokeswoman said. The incident is under investigation. 

At least 13 migrants, six of them children, drowned as two boats making the hazardous crossing from Turkey capsized in the Aegean Sea off Greece today, the coastguard said.

The first tragedy occurred off the island of Samos when a boat overturned just 20 metres from shore.

Ten bodies -- including six children, four of them babies -- were found in the vessel's cabin while that of a girl was washed up on the island, where dozens of refugees have perished trying to reach Europe in recent days.

Two others were still missing with coastguards saying 15 were plucked from the water. 

Patel quota agitation leader Hardik Patel's police custody was today extended by two more days till November 3 by an Ahmedabad court in an alleged case of sedition and waging war against the government.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate C G Mehta passed the order on an application of the city Crime Branch seeking seven days of further remand.

Hardik was produced before the court by the Crime Branch after his seven-day remand expired today and sought further remand on various grounds.

Public prosecutor Vanrajsinh Jebalia, representing the Crime Branch, stated in the remand application that Hardik, convener of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti, is "not cooperating" in the investigation.

Britain's last detainee at Guantanamo Bay detention camp released last week today demanded an apology from the US government for holding him 14 years behind bars without trial over terror charges.

Shaker Aamer's lawyer Clive Stafford Smith told the BBC he would sue the US for compensation but did not expect to win as "American law is pretty insane".

"Compensation is not what Shaker's about. What Shaker wants is a simple apology where they say 'we're really sorry we did this we'll make sure we set rules in place in future so we don't do it to other people's," he said.

The father-of-four, who returned to the UK on Friday, is receiving medical care and was keeping "very private", Stafford Smith said.

A family reunion is understood to have taken place, with Aamer meeting his youngest son for the first time.

Sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan today said writers and artistes who returned their awards "are not mad" but pained at the situation in the country, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi should rein in people responsible for it as there is lot of hope from him.

"What is happening is very painful. I was watching Narayanmurthy's interview yesterday and he also felt very concerned. Perhaps the situation does not seem to be normal..... Modiji wants to do a lot of things, but there are some persons around him, who speak whatever comes on their

tounge and do whatever they want," Khan told reporters here.

He said, "Modiji will have to rein in such persons otherwise the peace may be under threat. There are lots of hope from Modiji."

Asked about litterateurs and actors returning their awards, the Padam Vibhushan awardee said, "They are also concerned with the present situation therefore they are returning their awards. We have freedom of expression. It seems that there is something wrong somewhere."

Sexual assaults on men in China will be treated as a crime punishable with a minimum five year jail term as an amendment to the criminal law came into effect today amid an increase in such cases in the country.

The sexual assault of men was not previously listed as an offence under Chinese law. It is now a crime after an amendment to the Criminal Law that took effect today, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The amendment, adopted by the top legislature in August, stipulates that indecent assault on others, men or women, now carries a minimum sentence of five years in prison. 

In the former law, the clause "others" was "women," the report said.

The amendment was carried out amid increasing sexual attacks on men by men. Until now, it was difficult to file cases involving male sexual assault.

Writers including those who had returned their Sahitya Akademi awards today wrote to the National Academy of Letters urging it to build on the

resolution passed during its recent emergency meet and respond in a "strong, humane and robust" manner to situations.

"This is an urgent matter at this moment of spiralling hatred and intolerance," a group of 41 writers said a statement to the Akademi President, and also asked the literary body to "reinvent" itself.

At least 36 writers including Nayantara Sahgal, Ashok Vajpeyi, had one after another returned their state awards in protest against the Akademi's "muted response" to killings of writers and rationalists, besides on incidents such as the Dadri lynching and blackening of Sudheendra Kulkarni's face in Mumbai.

In a four-acre piece of land in Utah, a New York man is building his own 'sovereign nation' called Republic of Zaqistan, complete with a national flag, a robot sentry that guards the land and official passports.

 

Zaq Landsberg bought the land online in northwestern Box Elder County a decade ago.

"The conceptual goal is I want it to become a real country. I mean, that goal is not going to happen. It's impossible, but going through the motions, (I'm) trying to make that happen," Landsberg said.

The "harsh and desolate" land is known to Landsberg as the Republic of Zaqistan, and he is its president.

The land is roughly 96 km from the nearest town, 24 km away from a paved road.

Nearly 650 Indian fishermen have been arrested until October this year by maritime security agencies of different countries, with Sri Lanka topping the chart.

According to government sources, some 350 fishermen have been arrested and 52 fishing trawlers seized by Sri Lankan navy, while Pakistan's MSA has arrested 239 Indian fishermen and impounded 35 fishing boats. Bangladesh has 56 and Burma six Indian fishermen in its custody.

In a majority of these cases Indian fishermen ventured into the waters or the Exclusive Economic Zone of the neighbouring countries, which led their maritime security agencies to take action against them.

Sania Mirza and Martina Hingis ended the year on a high by winning the season-ending WTA Finals title on Sunday. The Indo-Swiss pair beat Spanish eighth seeds Garbine Muguruza and Carla Suarez Navarro 6-0, 6-3.

For Sania and Martina this is their ninth women's doubles titles this year, including two Grand Slam titles at Wimbledon and the US Open, since joining forces in March.

On Saturday in the semifinal, Sania and Martina outclassed Hao Ching Chan and Yung Jan Chan 6-4, 6-2 to book a place in the final.

Read more HERE.

At least four persons were killed and six others injured today when a remote-controlled bomb placed close to railway track struck a passenger train in Pakistan's restive Balochistan province.

The remote-controlled blast took place when Jaffar Express was running on the outskirts of Quetta. 

Police said the blast occurred when the improvised explosives device was detonated near the railway track in Dasht area when the Quetta-Rawalpindi Jaffar Express was passing through.

"The IED was around eight kilogrammes and caused damage to the train as a result of which four people have been killed while the injured have been rushed to the Civil hospital in Quetta," Home Minister Mir Sarfaraz Bugti told reporters. 

A thick column of black smoke hangs over the Iraqi Syrian border near the town of Ash Shaddadi in Syria 's Hasakah province. Above the area are the circular contrails of coalition planes.

Kurdish military sources on the Iraqi side of the border say ISIS strongholds and oil fields are being targeted south of Hasakah city.

At the same time the new US-backed alliance in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, has announced a new offensive has begun to liberate areas of Hasakah province occupied by ISIS.

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A 97-year-old woman has received an honorary diploma from a high school in Michigan, 79 years after she was forced to drop out to care for her sick mother.

Margaret Thome Bekema who would have walked with the Catholic Central High School class of 1936 in Grand Rapids, had to drop out in her junior year to care for her cancer-afflicted mother.

A video purportedly from ISIS surfaced online Friday and shows the terrorists beheading four Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in retaliation for the daring raid by US-led coalition forces last week in northern Iraq.

At the end of the 15-minute video, a masked English-speaking man delivers a warning to US President Barack Obama before he executes one of the prisoners, who is wearing an orange jumpsuit.

The three other prisoners are also seen being beheaded at the end of the video and Arabic text appears onscreen. It translates as "Peshmerga soldiers that Americans came down to rescue."

Earlier in the video, ISIS also claims to show the aftermath of the raid during which 70 hostages were rescued by Kurdish, US and Iraqi forces from an ISIS prison in Hawija, in the northern Iraq province of Kirkuk.

Read more HERE.

What started as a kiss inside a grocery store on an island vacation landed Courtney Wilson and Taylor Guerrero in jail and stuck far away from home without money for months, they say.

It was supposed to be a relaxing holiday in the place that feels closest to paradise -- Hawaii. The women in their 20s had been dating for two years and wanted a break from their daily grind in Los Angeles.

Then came the kiss at a Foodland store in Honolulu.

"We were holding hands and I was kissing her cheek," Guerrero said. "We were just happy to be out here," Wilson chimed in. "We were just being goofy," Guerrero added.

They were interrupted by yells and saw two people -- one a man in uniform.

"They called after us and told us basically you can't do that. Take that somewhere else," Wilson said. She said she thought it was just a couple of rude random guys. So the women went about buying their snacks.

Read more HERE.

China will launch a series of scientific satellites including a retrievable one to probe 'dark matter' from later this year, officials said today.

The development of four scientific satellites is going well, National Space Science Centre's director Wu Ji under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said at an event to mark the 10th anniversary of cooperation between China's Double Star space mission and the European Space Agency's Cluster mission to investigate the earth's magnetosphere.

The first of the series, the dark matter particle explorer, will be launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China at the end of this year.

All the major tests and experiments have been completed, and a mission control centre for scientific satellites has been set up in Huairou, a northern suburb of Beijing, Wu said. 

The dark-matter particle explorer satellite will observe the direction, energy and electric charge of high-energy particles in space in search of dark matter, chief scientist of the project Chang Jin said.

It will have the widest observation spectrum and highest energy resolution of any dark-matter probe in the world.

Dark matter is one of the most important mysteries of  physics. Scientists believe in its existence based on the law of universal gravitation, but have never directly detected it. 

A Russian passenger plane crashed early Saturday in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard, officials said.

Russian state media reported that many of the 217 passengers on Kogalymavia Flight 9268 were Russians returning from vacation. The passenger manifest included 17 children but Russian officials said there were 25 aboard. There were seven crew members.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin tweeted that four victims were Ukrainian nationals.

The cause of the crash still is unknown, but it is most likely due to a technical failure, and there is no evidence of any terrorist action, Egyptian Airports Co. chief Adel Al-Mahjoob told CNN Arabic.

Read more HERE.

Gunmen stormed a popular hotel in Mogadishu on Sunday after opening their attack with multiple blasts, Somali officials said.

Many civilians died in the attack, they said. But they did not give a death or injury toll, and the siege was ongoing in the morning hours, as Somali special forces moved in to fight the militants.

The attack started when a suicide car bomb exploded at the gates of Sahafi Hotel, which government officials use as a residence, interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Yusuf Osman said.

An intelligence service official, who did not want to be named, said that two more explosions detonated during the attack -- one believed to be a bomb remotely targeting first responders. The third explosion was believed to be carried out by a suicide attacker.

Intelligence services are still investigating the attack.

Read more HERE.

Survivors spoke of the horror that unfolded when fireworks -- set off during a pre-Halloween gig by a heavy metal band late on Friday -- unleashed a blaze, followed by a stampede as terrified clubbers sought the exit.As the government declared three days of national mourning Prime Minister Victor Ponta said foreigners were among the injured, including two Spanish people, an Italian and a German, authorities said.

President Klaus Iohannis said there were indications that safety regulations had been ignored at the club, and called for a swift investigation.

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