In a once-thriving village on the Pacific island of Niue, homes lie abandoned, their stucco-clad walls mildewed and crumbling as the jungle slowly reclaims them.

"These villages used to be bustling with people -- now you go there in the afternoon and there's no one," says the Niue Tourism Authority chairman Hima Douglas.

Floods claimed their first victim in Japan and nearly 300,000 people were urged to flee their homes Saturday as a weather system that killed dozens on the Korean peninsula swept the country.

Local governments in the central province of Niigata and tsunami-hit Fukushima issued the guidance after the national weather agency urged citizens to be on maximum alert against more flooding and mudslides.

The death toll rose to 25 Saturday from two separate coal mining accidents on the same day in Ukraine's eastern industrial district, notorious for its poor safety standards.

The Ukrainian emergency ministry raised the toll from 16 to 18 from an explosion early Friday at the Sukhodolskaya-Vostochnaya coal mine in the eastern Lugansk region.

Top Nazi war crimes suspect Alois Brunner was close to being extradited to former East Germany when the fall of the Berlin Wall put a halt on proceedings, an Austrian weekly said Saturday.

Based on unpublished documents from the former East German Stasi secret police, communist East Germany (GDR) negotiated with Syria in the late 1980s to have the Austrian Brunner extradited and arrested in Berlin, the 'profil' news weekly said in a statement.

The U.S. space agency plans to launch next week a solar-powered spacecraft called Juno that will journey to the gassy planet of Jupiter in search of how the huge, stormy giant was formed.

The $1.1 billion unmanned orbiter is scheduled for launch on August 5 -- the start of a five-year odyssey toward the solar system's most massive planet in the hopes that it will be able to circle Jupiter for a period of a year.

Egypt's military has arrested five people in connection with clashes in the north Sinai city of El-Arish that left four people dead, the official MENA news agency said on Saturday.

Armed forces arrested four men suspected of involvement in an attack on an El-Arish police station, while another man was arrested driving close to the police station with two machine guns in his possession, MENA said.

Thirteen items belonging to the late kung fu legend Bruce Lee, including a 1966 letter he wrote and a fur-lined coat will go under the hammer in a Hong Kong auction next week, a report said Saturday.

The sale, which could raise up to HK$880,000 ($112,900), is believed to be the largest-scale auction of his memorabilia in the southern Chinese city, where Lee was raised before moving to the United States in his late teens.

It's the height of the British summer, but inside London's top department stores, a winter wonderland has been unveiled for visitors who just can't wait until Christmas.

Harrods and Selfridges launched their Christmas decoration sales on July 28, the earliest ever with an impressive 149 days to go until December 25, while Hamleys announced its predictions for the top Christmas toys one month ago.

Kyrgyzstan on Friday dismantled a "Statue of Liberty" in the center of the capital Bishkek, mocked for its apparent resemblance to a widely disliked former First Lady.

Workers in the early hours took down the towering statue, which depicted a female angel sitting on top of a globe and holding aloft the roof of a traditional yurt.

The royal palace and the headquarters of the governing Labor Party were on self-confessed Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik's list of targets, the tabloid Verdens Gang (VG) reported Saturday.

"During his interrogation, he said that he had planned to attack other targets, but on July 22 it was only the seat of government in Oslo and Utoeya," the island where young Labor Party supporters were holding their summer camp, prosecutor Paal-Fredrick Hjort Kraby was quoted as telling the paper.