National-World

By Steven Jiang and Simone McCarthy, CNN Beijing (CNN) — China has declined to comment on its defense minister’s whereabouts as questions swirl over his status a month after he was last seen in public. Gen. Li Shangfu’s absence since late August has fueled rumors about his fate, but during a regular press briefing Thursday,

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN (CNN) — Round discs of barren dirt known as “fairy circles” look like rows of polka dots that can spread for miles over the ground. The phenomenon’s mysterious origins have intrigued scientists for decades — and they may be far more widespread than once thought. Fairy circles were previously spotted only

By Christian Edwards and Benjamin Brown, CNN (CNN) — The self-declared republic of Nagorno-Karabakh will cease to exist from next year after its president signed a decree dissolving state institutions following its defeat by Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani victory last week triggered a a huge exodus of ethnic Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh and marked the end

By Tara Subramaniam and Chris Liakos, CNN (CNN) — Storm Elias dumped several months-worth of rain in less than a day as it swept across Greece on Wednesday, just weeks after Storm Daniel killed 17 people in the southern European nation. Villages were flooded, roads inundated and schools forced to close in several municipalities as

By Hafsa Khalil, CNN London (CNN) — Oxford was the murder capital of late-medieval England, with the city’s male university population being the main catalyst for violence, according to new research. The homicide rate in the city was four to five times higher than that of 14th-century London or York, said researchers from the University

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN (CNN) — Slovakia is getting ready to elect its fifth prime minister in just four years, and with Kremlin sympathizer Robert Fico’s opposition party leading the polls, it is one being watched with alarm in the West. Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, Slovakia has been one of Kyiv’s staunchest allies.

By Eric Cheung, CNN Kaohsiung, Taiwan (CNN) — Taiwan unveiled its first-ever domestically built submarine on Thursday, an accomplishment the island democracy’s leader hailed as a significant milestone as Taipei works to boost its military deterrence in the face of a growing threat from Beijing. President Tsai Ing-wen presided over a ceremony at the submarine’s

By Chris Lau, CNN (CNN) — An Australian man who faked his own kidnapping to spend time with his mistress on New Year’s Eve has been ordered to pay back the cost of the police operation to find him. Paul Iera appeared at Wollongong Local Court in New South Wales on Tuesday and was told

By Jessie Yeung, Gawon Bae and Larry Register, CNN Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — North Korea has amended its constitution to bolster and expand its nuclear force, with leader Kim Jong Un pointing to the growing cooperation between the United States, South Korea and Japan as “the worst actual threat” facing the isolated nation. The

By Gawon Bae and Jessie Yeung, CNN Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — A South Korean man has been sentenced to jail for using artificial intelligence to generate exploitative images of children, the first case of its kind in the country as courts around the world encounter the use of new technologies in creating abusive sexual

By Jonny Hallam, Mariya Knight, Simone McCarthy and Lauren Kent, CNN (CNN) — At least one person was killed and 163 people were injured in a massive warehouse explosion in the Uzbekistan capital Tashkent early on Thursday morning, health officials said. The situation at the scene of the warehouse explosion in Tashkent, Uzbekistan is “under

By Olga Voitovych, Vasco Cotovio, Fred Pleitgen, Yulia Kesaieva, CNN (CNN) — Fighters who had previously fought in Ukraine for the Russian mercenary group Wagner have returned to the battlefield in the east, according to the Ukrainian military. Wagner mercenaries had withdrawn from the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in May as they handed control