Millions of Shiite Muslims, beating their heads and chests in mourning, packed the Iraqi city of Karbala Thursday for the culmination of one of the world's largest religious events.

The faithful have for days been streaming through the golden-domed mausoleum of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Mohammed's grandson who was killed in 680 AD.

Australia on Thursday said fresh analysis of data on missing jet MH370 confirmed authorities are searching in the right place, with hopes remaining that it will one day be found.

Australia has been leading the difficult search in the remote southern Indian Ocean for the Malaysia Airlines plane since it mysteriously disappeared on March 8 last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

San Bernardino is prey to regular gang violence, but the California desert town has never seen carnage of the scale that left 14 dead on what had been just another Wednesday morning.

Paul George, a youth center leader, was around the block when the shooting erupted inside a packed conference room at the Inland Regional Center for the disabled.

South Sudan's U.N. ambassador said Wednesday that nearly 180,000 people sheltering in U.N. bases in his war-torn country should be encouraged to return home despite ongoing fighting.

Ambassador Francis Deng told the U.N. Security Council that the bases were never meant to hold such large numbers of people and that peacekeepers should broaden their protection to areas outside the camps.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday made a surprise visit to Crimea, inaugurating an undersea cable project to bring a new power supply to the strategic Black Sea peninsula.

Until late November, Crimea's electricity had mostly been supplied by Ukraine. But the territory's population of nearly two million has been plagued by power cuts since Crimea's four main pylons in Ukraine were blown up late last month.

Two heavily-armed suspects, a man and a woman in their 20s, have died in a shootout with police after killing 14 people at a Christmas party in California in America's deadliest mass shooting in three years.

Police identified the two as Syed Farook, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen who worked for the local county, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, whose nationality was unknown. They said the suspects were either married or in a relationship.

Brazil's lower house speaker triggered impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff on Wednesday, setting the stage for a political battle that could see the country's first female leader forced from office.

"It's to authorize the initiation (of impeachment), not to judge on its merits," Speaker Eduardo Cunha told journalists after officially accepting an impeachment petition, which now goes to a committee which will decide whether or not to authorize a trial.

Donald Trump has extended his lead in the Republican presidential nomination race amid a fresh bout of controversy over his remarks about Muslims, while Hillary Clinton has consolidated her lead among Democrats, a poll showed Wednesday.

Less than two months before the first state-wide votes to determine the presidential nominees, Trump was his party's undisputed leader, backed by 27 percent of registered Republican voters, while his closest challenger for months, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, has faded to third place, according to the Quinnipiac University survey.

Germany is seeking an agreement with Turkey to deploy six reconnaissance aircraft at a base close to Syria as Ankara gave France the go-ahead to use its airspace in the fight against the Islamic State group, diplomatic sources said Wednesday.

As Berlin steps up its role in the anti-IS fight, Turkey and Germany were working to finalize a memorandum of understanding to agree within a legal framework the deployment of six Tornado reconnaissance aircraft as well as one refueling aircraft at the Incirlik air base, a source in Ankara said.

The United States strongly denied Wednesday a Russian claim that the Turkish government buys smuggled Syrian oil from the Islamic State jihadist group.

A State Department spokesman admitted that there was a longstanding issue of oil being illegally transported to Turkey from wells in what is now IS territory.