USA: Some South Carolina high school students have started an online petition to bring back a teacher who resigned after a student spread a nude picture of her through text messages and social media.

Top drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman has done what Mexican authorities promised would not happen again after his recapture last year — escaped for a second time from a maximum security prison.

A 6.9 magnitude earthquake on the Pacific Coast has jolted a wide area of southern Mexico and Central America.

This week, Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ken Watanabe face a monstrous threat to humanity in the action-packed blockbuster Godzilla, and a sexually repressed young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) struggles to break free from a loveless marriage in ‘In Secret’.

A strong earthquake on the Pacific coast of Mexico shook the capital today, sending frightened office workers streaming into the streets away from high-rise buildings.

A strong earthquake has shaken Chile’s northern Pacific coast, prompting authorities to evacuate more than 100,000 people as a precaution.

At least 14 people were killed as a powerful typhoon sparked mudslides which destroyed homes on a Japanese island before sweeping up the Pacific coast, grounding hundreds of flights and disrupting Tokyo’s transport network during rush hour.

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due out tomorrow.

Soldiers dug through tons of mud and dirt in search of victims of a massive landslide, as Mexican authorities looked for a police helicopter that went missing while carrying out relief operations on the flood-stricken Pacific coast.

Fifty-eight people are missing feared dead after a massive landslide smashed through a tiny coffee-growing village deep in Mexico’s southern mountains as storms battered the country.

Fire has broken out on a Russian nuclear submarine undergoing repairs, but no injuries or radiation leaks have been reported.

A Mexican family says that a car bought at a US government auction came with an unwanted extra: an undiscovered package of cocaine beneath the dashboard.

A man believed to be the leader of the Gulf drug cartel, which controls some of the most valuable and violently contested smuggling routes along the US border, was arrested by Mexican marines and paraded before the public.

A man believed to be the leader of the Gulf drug cartel, which controls some of the most valuable and violently contested smuggling routes along the US border, has been arrested by Mexican marines, the navy said.

Hurricane Bud is expected make land today in an area of beach resorts and small mountain villages on the Pacific coast stretching south from the Mexican resort of Puerto Vallarta.

Russia’s long dominant party appeared likely to lose its edge as voters across the sprawling country cast ballots for Parliament today, many of them frustrated over corruption and the gap between ordinary Russians and the super-rich.

The bound and gagged bodies of 26 men were found in the heart of Guadalajara, a sign that full-scale war between Mexican drug cartels may have come to the picturesque western city which hosted last month’s Pan American Games.

A COUPLE of weeks ago I wrote about Monkey Puzzle trees, mentioning that the man responsible for introducing them to these islands was Archibald Menzies, a Scottish medical doctor and botanist.

A boat carrying $180m (€126.7m) of cocaine has been caught by US coastguards in the Caribbean.

Japan was struck by a magnitude-8.8 earthquake off its north-eastern coast today, triggering a 13-foot tsunami that washed away cars and tore away buildings along the coast near the epicentre.

Review: Jennifer Hough

At least 30 gunmen burst into a drug rehabilitation centre in a Mexican border state capital and opened fire, killing 19 men and wounding four people.

Gunmen burst into a party in western Mexico and killed eight youths and left another person wounded.

The first tsunami from an earthquake in Chile hit Japan’s outlying islands today, but while the initial waves were small and most of the Pacific islands already in its path were spared damage, officials warned a bigger surge could follow.

EL SALVADOR’S interior minister said the death toll is now 91 from floods and landslides touched off by three days of heavy rains.

Forty people have died in El Salvador following three days of heavy rains, Interior Minister Humberto Centeno said today.

The fire safety system on new Russian nuclear-powered submarine malfunctioned on a test run in the Sea of Japan, spewing chemicals that killed at least 20 people and injured 21 others, officials said today.

CANADIANS yesterday began voting in the country’s third election in four years, likely to return the Conservatives to office in the first G7 ballot since the start of a global financial meltdown.

Two huge wildfires burned into neighbourhoods near Los Angeles last night, forcing frantic evacuations, destroying homes and causing at least two deaths.

ROBERT “Willie” Pickton has been convicted of the serial killings of six women whose bodies were butchered like animals in his farm’s slaughterhouse.

US, Honduran and Nicaraguan soldiers searched remote jungle beaches and the open sea for survivors and bodies after Hurricane Felix claimed at least 98 lives, many of them Miskito Indians who died fleeing the Category 5 storm.

Hurricane Henriette today threatened Mexico’s mainland on a track for the south-western US, while the weakening remains of mighty Hurricane Felix, far to the south, caused flooding, landslides and at least 9 deaths in Central America.

The head of the British Embassy’s economic section in Moscow was one of four diplomats told to leave Russia in the tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions that have followed the poisoning of Kremlin foe Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Leftist Rafael Correa, an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, looks set for a win over a pro-US banana tycoon in Ecuador’s presidential elections

A POWERFUL undersea earthquake prompted tsunami warnings yesterday for Japan and Russia but the danger appeared to pass after a series of tiny waves hit the northern Japanese coast.

Japan issued a tsunami alert today and told Pacific coast residents to flee to higher ground after a powerful earthquake hit off sparsely populated islands between northern Japan and the Russian Far East.

THREE Mexican fishermen who survived nine months adrift in a small boat in the Pacific Ocean are under investigation for possible links to drug trafficking.

MASSIVE waves generated by a storm 2,000 miles away battered a long stretch of the Pacific coast yesterday, wrecking homes, hotels and restaurants from Peru to Central America.

WATCH your back! A house named Sequoia, and with a tree of that large-growing type planted in its grounds, is for sale on a fertile wooded section of Rochestown, on the Monastery road.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said today stronger economic relations between Russia and Japan would help improve ties between the countries, strained by a 60-year territorial dispute.

A strong earthquake shook northern Japan today and the country’s Meteorological Agency issued tsunami warnings.

Rescue workers in Guatemala say they have pulled at least 40 bodies from a massive mudslide and found 20 more dead in a swollen river, raising to 246 the number of people killed from five days of pounding rains in Central America and Mexico.

A British remote-controlled vehicle cut loose a Russian mini-submarine that had been snarled on undersea cables for three days deep in the Pacific, and it surfaced today with its crew safe.

Russian news agencies have reported that Japan is to send four ships to help rescue seven Russian sailors trapped on a naval mini-submarine on the sea floor off the Pacific Coast.