(ROME) — An earthquake triggered by Mount Etna’s eruption jolted eastern Sicily before dawn Wednesday, injuring at least 10 people, damaging churches and houses on the volcano’s slopes and prompting panicked villagers to flee their homes.Italy’s Civil Protection officials said the quake, which struck at 3:19 a.m., was part of a swarm of some 1,000 tremors, most of them barely perceptible, linked to Etna’s volcanic eruption this week.Italy’s national seismology institute said the quake had a magnitude of 4.8 on the open-ended Richter scale and 4.9 on the moment magnitude scale, which relates to the amount the ground slips. It struck north of Catania, the largest city in the eastern part of the Mediterranean island, but no damage or injuries were reported there.
The quake opened up cracks in homes in several towns, sending chunks of concrete debris tumbling to the ground. It toppled a Madonna statue in a church in Santa Venerina and broke up sidewalks and a stretch of highway, forcing it..

(SEOUL, South Korea) — South Korean officials attended a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday for an aspirational project to modernize North Korean railways and roads and connect them with the South.

The ceremony at the North Korean border town of Kaesong came weeks after the Koreas conducted a joint survey on the northern railway sections they hope to someday link with the South.

The ambitious project is among a variety of peace gestures agreed between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and liberal South Korean President Moon Jae-in as they push ahead with engagement amid a stalemate in larger nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.

But beyond on-site reviews and ceremonies, the Koreas cannot move the project much further along without the removal of U.S.-led sanctions against the North.

During his three summits with Moon and a meeting with President Donald Trump in June, Kim signed vague statements pledging a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing how and when ..

(TOKYO) — Japan says it is leaving the International Whaling Commission to resume commercial hunts but says it will no longer go to the Antarctic to hunt.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Wednesday that Japan’s commercial whaling will be limited to its territorial and economic waters.

The IWC imposed a commercial moratorium in the 1980s due to a dwindling whale population. Japan switched to what it calls research whaling and says stocks have recovered enough to resume commercial hunt. The research program was criticized as a cover for commercial hunting as the meat is sold on the market at home.

Japan has said the IWC has become more like an opponent of whaling than an organization aiming for sustainability.

Japan has cut back on its catch as Japanese consume less whale meat.

Islamic State claimed a suicide attack on the Libyan Foreign Ministry’s headquarters in Tripoli that officials said killed three people, in the latest blow to efforts to stabilize the war-ravaged North African nation.

Gunmen opened fire on the ministry and one of them blew himself up, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. At least 18 others were wounded, Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha said in a televised news conference, putting the death toll at two. It wasn’t immediately possible to reconcile the difference in the toll.

The blast set off a fire inside the building, and black smoke could be seen billowing from its windows, footage from state television showed. The pavement outside was scattered with glass and debris, and nearby cars were on fire.

Libya Province, a local arm of Islamic State, claimed credit for the attack in a statement posted to its Amaq news agency and distributed by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors global terrorist activity. Though the group has been..