A landslide triggered by torrential rains Thursday engulfed a village in western Indonesia, burying 18 people, an official said.

Three have been found dead and rescuers are searching for the bodies of 15 others after the landslide hit the village of Lebong Tandai on Sumatra island, a hilly area known for gold mining.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday vowed Turkey's leadership would be made to regret the downing of one of Russia's warplanes as Moscow announced a halt to talks on a major gas pipeline project.

As Putin fired another salvo in his mounting war of words with NATO member Turkey his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared he had "proof" that Russia was involved in illegal oil trading with the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visits Cyprus on Thursday in a bid to boost intensified peace talks to reunify the long-divided Mediterranean island.

Hopes have grown for a peace deal to reunite the island since leaders in the Greek Cypriot south and Turkish Cypriot north resumed negotiations in May.

Afghan officials scrambled Thursday to establish whether Taliban supremo Mullah Akhtar Mansour was still alive, after sources said he was "critically" wounded in a firefight following a bitter argument with commanders in the divided militant movement.

Thousands of rescuers raced to evacuate residents from deadly flooding Thursday, as India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to the southern state of Tamil Nadu to survey the devastation.

More than 40,000 people have been rescued in recent days after record rains lashed the coastal state, worsening weeks of flooding that has killed 269 people.

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.