Breaking News } Flash Flood Watch for Johnston county.

Police say a Czech tourist hitchhiking in New Zealand was sexually assaulted and murdered by a man who then killed himself.

China is denying spying allegations against one of its diplomats who left Japan this month after refusing a police request to appear for questioning.

Rescue workers on Wednesday searched for one person still unaccounted for in the second deadly earthquake to hit northern Italy's Emilia region this month as the government began taking measures to rebuild an area so crucial to Italy's economic health.

A Pakistan doctor who assisted the CIA in tracking down Osama bin Laden was sentenced to 33 years in prison for conspiring with an Islamist militant commander, not his involvement the American spy agency.

Residents of this remote hamlet that lacks running water and electricity, and lives off cattle ranching and coca-growing were preparing a barbeque for Wednesday's planned handover of a French journalist by Colombia's main leftist rebel group.

Judges at an international war crimes court were passing sentence Wednesday on former Liberian President Charles Taylor following his landmark conviction for supporting rebels in Sierra Leone who murdered and mutilated thousands during their country's brutal civil war.

Australia's attorney general on Wednesday introduced legislation that would broaden the legal definition of slavery to include organ trafficking and forced marriage.

Moving to Rio, I had visions of paradise, of a sprawling apartment with panoramic views over a palm-lined beach.

A Kuwaiti-led energy consortium on Wednesday won the right to search for oil and gas in southern Iraq as part of the country's fourth postwar energy auction. Two natural gas exploration deals meanwhile attracted no bidders.

Nepal's opposition parties said they will team up to topple the government, as they accused the prime minister Wednesday of having no moral or legal grounds to stay in power ahead of new elections.

A Thai court sentenced a local webmaster Wednesday to an eight-month suspended sentence for failing to act quickly enough to remove Internet posts deemed insulting to the country's royalty in a case widely seen as a test of freedom of expression in this Southeast Asian nation.

The families of 29 men killed 18 months ago when an explosion ripped through a New Zealand coal mine say they are abandoning their campaign to get the remains returned.

Australia's highest court has found that a man can be tried for raping his then-wife almost 50 years ago.

Kicking off her first trip abroad in nearly a quarter-century, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi offered encouragement Wednesday to impoverished migrants whose flight to neighboring Thailand is emblematic of the devastation wrought on her homeland by decades of misrule.

Archaeologists said Tuesday that they'll ask the United Nations' cultural agency to bestow world heritage status on Port Royal, the mostly submerged remains of a historic Jamaican port known as the "wickedest city on Earth" more than three centuries ago.

The U.S. ambassador to Russia said Wednesday that he was surprised by the Russian Foreign Ministry's criticism of his remarks at a meeting with students last week and the Ministry's interpretation that he had suggested Russia tried to bribe Kyrgyzstan.

The European Union's greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2010 for the first time in six years, but the 27-nation bloc is still on track to meet its target under an international climate accord, the EU's environmental agency said Wednesday.

United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan met Tuesday with Syrian President Bashar Asssad to express dismay over the killing last week of 108 people in the Syrian town of Houla as evidence mounts that Syria's warring factions have hardened their positions a month and a half after a U.N.-backed cease-fire went into effect.