More than one million Montreal residents are being told to boil their drinking water after a malfunction at Canada's second-biggest filtration plant.
Along the northwestern Philippine coast, poor children with claw hammers clamber aboard an abandoned fishing vessel to pry loose and steal rusty nails from its deck. It's become a familiar sight in villages where some fishermen have been forced to give up their livelihoods since China took control of their fishing haven last year.
A Russian drunken driver who sparked a nationwide debate after killing seven, including five orphan children, in a road accident last year has been sentenced to prison.
Seven soldiers kidnapped last week by suspected Islamist militants in the restive Sinai were freed after a six-hour negotiation between local tribesmen and the kidnappers, the Egyptian government announcement Wednesday.
The Czech president says he will no longer block a university professorship for a gay rights activist who had been critical of him.
France's Foreign Ministry says it is strengthening security measures, hiring more guards and buying new equipment to help protect French facilities abroad amid shifting threats.
Groups of youth have smashed shop windows, set cars ablaze and burnt down a cultural center as the riots that started in one Stockholm suburb after a fatal police shooting spread to other low-income areas of the Swedish capital.
Scientists say one of Costa Rica's largest volcanos is spewing clouds of ash and gas, setting off a small-scale evacuation.
Two men with butcher knives hacked another to death Wednesday near a London military barracks and one then went on video to explain the crime - shouting political statements, gesturing with bloodied hands and waving a meat cleaver. Soon after, arriving police shot and wounded the unidentified assailants and took them into custody.
Japan's nuclear watchdog on Wednesday endorsed a panel's conclusion that a seismic fault running underneath one of two reactors at an atomic plant in western Japan is active, making the reactor's restart virtually impossible.
