RIYADH (AFP) -- The Saudi health ministry on Sunday announced a new MERS death, raising to 55 the number of people killed by the coronavirus in the country with the most fatalities.A 37-year-old Saudi man died in Riyadh, the ministry said on its website.The World Health Organisation says it has been informed of 155 laboratory-confirmed MERS cases worldwide so far, including 64 deaths, most of them in Saudi Arabia.Experts are struggling to understand the disease, for which there is no vaccine.It

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States and Iran secretly engaged in a series of high-level, face-to-face talks over the past year, in a high-stakes diplomatic gamble by the Obama administration that paved the way for the historic deal sealed early Sunday in Geneva aimed at slowing Tehran's nuclear program, The Associated Press has learned.The discussions were kept hidden even from America's closest friends, including its negotiating partners and Israel, until two months ago, and that may explain h

KABUL (AP) -- Afghanistan's president on Sunday refused to sign a security deal with the United States until next April's elections, ignoring a recommendation by an assembly of Afghan elders and leaders that he do so by the end of 2013.Hamid Karzai spoke after the 2,500-member national consultative council known as the Loya Jirga approved the deal and asked that the Bilateral Security Agreement be signed by year's end.Delegates had spent three days debating the deal seen as necessary to enable t

BEIRUT (AFP) -- At least 160 rebel fighters and Syrian troops have been killed in two days of clashes in the Eastern Ghouta region just outside Damascus, a monitoring group said on Sunday.The latest fighting comes against the backdrop of regime advances in Damascus province that have cut rebel supply lines to the capital and its southern districts.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting began Friday when rebel forces, including jihadist fighters, launched attacks against checkp

TEHRAN (AFP) -- A senior Iranian official has denied reports the Islamic republic has temporarily stopped enriching uranium to the 20 percent level, the state news agency IRNA said on Saturday."Iran's nuclear activities are unchanged and enriching uranium to 20 percent continues," IRNA quoted Alaeddin Boroujerdi, who heads the Iranian parliament's influential foreign policy committee, as saying.Iran's nuclear enrichment programme is at the core of its dispute with world powers, who suspect it ma

BUSAN (Yonhap News) -- The remains of two South Korean victims who were killed in a Lao plane crash were brought home on Saturday, government and airport officials said.The French-made ATR-72 jet crashed into the Mekong River while attempting to land in bad weather on Oct. 16, killing all 49 passengers and crewmembers on board, including three South Koreans.The remains of Lee Jae-sang and Lee Kang-pil, whose bodies were identified days after the accident and then cremated, arrived at Gimhae Inte

TEHRAN (AFP) -- The Iranian authorities on Saturday hanged 16 "rebels" following overnight clashes in which 14 border guards were killed on the frontier with Pakistan, a judicial official said."Sixteen rebels linked to groups hostile to the regime were hanged this morning in the prison of Zahedan in response to the death of border guards in Saravan," Mohammad Marzieh, the attorney general of Sistan-Baluchestan province, was quoted as saying by Fars news agency."We warned the rebel groups that an

BEIJING (Yonhap News) -- South Korea plans to forge closer diplomatic cooperation with China to jointly counter reinforced Japanese moves to lay claims to Seoul's easternmost islets of Dokdo, the South Korean ambassador in Beijing said Saturday.Ambassador Kwon Young-se made the remarks at an annual parliamentary audit on the embassy as Japan is stepping up its global PR campaign for its assertions of sovereignty over Dokdo.China is also in an acute territorial dispute with Japan over a set of is

검찰, 출국금지 일시 해제한 듯KT "경영상 판단일 뿐 배임 아냐…르완다 출장은 연초에 정해진 일"이석채 KT 회장이 검찰이 자신의 배임 혐의 등에 대해 수사를 벌이는 중에 아프리카 르완다에서 열리는 국제행사 참석차 출국했다.검찰이 압수수색을 벌이며 KT의 부실 경영 등에 대해 본격적으로 수사에 나선 가운데 출국을 강행한 것으로, 일각에서 제기되는 사퇴설에도 회장직 계속 수행 의지를 강하게 드러낸 것으로 보인다.  이 회장은 26일 오전 영킴 코퍼레이트센터장, 김홍진 G&E(글로벌&엔터프라이즈) 부문장과 함께 르완다에서 열리는 '트랜스폼 아프리카 서밋 2013'(Transform Africa Summit 2013 & Exhibition) 참석차 인천 공항을 통해 출국했다.검찰주변에서는 애초 검찰이 이 회장을 출국금지했지만, 변호인을 통해 행사 의미와 행사 참여의 필요성을 강조한 이 회장측의 요청을 받아들여 출국금지를 해제한 것이라는 말이 나왔다.KT가 르완다 정부와 공동으로 28~3

WASHINGTON (AFP) -- Skewed data and the economic setback of the partial government shutdown face Federal Reserve policymakers as they review their economic stimulus program on Tuesday and Wednesday.The broad consensus is that, in their first meeting with Janet Yellen as the official heir-apparent to chairman Ben Bernanke, the Federal Open Market Committee will opt again to wait for more evidence of economic strength.That will prolong the guessing game of when the "taper" of QE3, the Fed's $85 bi

BEIRUT (AFP) -- Kurdish fighters in Syria seized a crossing on the eastern border with Iraq from jihadist rebel forces during fierce clashes at dawn on Saturday, a monitoring group said.The Kurds "took control of the Al-Yaarubia border crossing with Iraq at dawn after clashes with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, the Al-Nusra Front and other rebels," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.The clashes left fighters dead on both sides, said the Observatory, a Britain-based organisat

The chairman of the telecom giant KT Corp., who is being probed by prosecutors over corruption allegations, left Saturday to attend an international meeting in Rwanda, the company said.Lee Suk-chae flew to Kigali to attend the Transform Africa 2013 Summit from Oct. 28-31, KT said, adding that he will make a keynote speech at the event.The departure came days after the prosecution raided 16 places, including the head office of KT and Lee's home, in connection with allegations that he caused the c

WASHINGTON (AFP) -- Boeing and Lockheed Martin said Friday they have teamed up to bid for a new $55 billion US Air Force bomber program aimed at replacing the aging bomber fleet.Boeing is acting as the prime contractor, and Lockheed is the main teammate in the bid to supply the Air Force's Long-Range Strike Bomber program, the companies said in a joint statement."Boeing and Lockheed Martin are bringing together the best of the two enterprises, and the rest of industry, in support of the Long-Ran

Twitter Inc. will make the case to potential investors in its initial public offering that it needs to keep spending to grow, and profit will come once it can reap the benefits of those investments. “The magnitude of our investments has limited our margins,” Chief Financial Officer Mike Gupta said in a video posted today to accompany the investor road show, which begins next week and will take Gupta and Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo from their San Francisco home to cities including New Yo

Apple Inc., Google Inc. and two other Silicon Valley companies must face a group lawsuit representing more than 64,000 technical employees claiming their incomes were held down by the companies’ agreements not to recruit one another’s workers. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, yesterday granted class-action certification. Koh’s ruling follows an April ruling rejecting the employees’ bid to proceed as a class -- partly because they failed to demonstrate that all or almost all

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration is asking Congress to hold off on enacting new sanctions against Iran. It says a pause in the push to impose new penalties would give negotiators flexibility in talks now under way to get Iran to comply with demands it prove its nuclear program is peaceful.Even as U.S. officials argue that tough sanctions are what brought Iran to the negotiating table in the first place, the White House and State Department said Friday the administration wants lawmaker

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Brazil said Friday it is working with other countries to draft a U.N. General Assembly resolution that would guarantee people's privacy in electronic communications. That follows a series of reports of alleged U.S. eavesdropping on foreign leaders and others that has surprised and angered allies.Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff has been especially outspoken. She even took the rare step of canceling a state visit to Washington after classified documents leaked by former Na

WASHINGTON (AFP) -- The National Security Agency's website went down for several hours Friday, but the US spy service known for hacking into computer networks blamed the outage on a technical mistake.The website, NSA.gov, went down in the afternoon, setting off speculation on Twitter that the site may have suffered a denial of service attack by hackers.But an NSA spokesperson denied the claims, saying they were "not true.""NSA.gov was not accessible for several hours tonight because of an intern

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) -- Defense lawyers for five men charged in the Sept. 11 attack appealed to President Barack Obama to declassify details of the CIA's secret interrogation program of terrorist suspects as the latest installment in the long-running proceedings came to an end Friday.The lawyers said in a letter to the president that the secrecy that cloaks the treatment of their clients in CIA custody is being used to cover-up what they say was torture and is now preventing them

JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to pay $5.1 billion to settle Federal Housing Finance Agency claims related to home loans and mortgage-backed securities the bank sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, resolving part of a $13 billion accord the company has been negotiating. The deal includes $4 billion to end a 2011 lawsuit accusing the bank of selling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac faulty mortgage bonds, the FHFA said today in a statement. The remaining $1.1 billion settles claims that the bank sold the co