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Mali's defence minister has been killed in an apparent suicide truck bombing on his residence near the capital Bamako.Multiple news outlets reported the death of Sadio Camara, part of a wave of coordinated attacks by jihadist militants and separatists carried out across the country.State TV confirmed the death several hours later, saying he died of wounds received while engaging with the attackers. Reports say the head of the military junta, Gen Assimi Goita, was moved to a safe location after his home was targeted.Further north Russian mercenaries hired by Mali's military agreed to withdraw from Kidal after two days of...

An al Qaeda affiliate and Tuareg rebels claimed responsibility on Saturday for coordinated attacks across Mali, in one of the boldest operations ​insurgents have mounted in their campaign against the military-led government.Mali's army said in a statement it had killed "several hundred" assailants and repelled the assault, which hit ‌multiple sites in or near the capital, Bamako. It said a large-scale sweep operation was underway in Bamako, the nearby barracks town of Kati and elsewhere in the gold-producing country.It was unclear how many soldiers or civilians were killed in the attacks. In a statement read out on state television on...

HH: I begin this Thursday with Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn, www.steynonline.com. Very few people have traveled as far around the globe as Mark. Mark, have you ever seen anything remotely approaching this Haiti thing? MS: No, because I think Haiti is, certainly in the Western Hemisphere, as near as you can get to an entirely non-functioning state. By the standards of the Caribbean, it’s a failure and a disaster before the earthquake strikes. If an earthquake had happened to strike the Bahamas, or even the Turks And Caicos, it would not have looked like this. And that’s why...

Study: Scurvy Hit Early N. American French Colony 1 hour, 4 minutes ago Science - Reuters CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scurvy wiped out nearly half of the colonists who established one of the first French settlements in North America 400 years ago, scientists confirmed on Monday. The colony existed in 1604 and 1605 on St. Croix Island off present-day Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick. Nearly half of the 79 settlers died during the harsh winter, prompting survivors to move to what is now Nova Scotia in the summer of 1605. It was one of the earliest European outposts on...