A Malaysian official said Sunday that the country is “more than willing” to restart the search for the vanished MH370 plane should any company present a fresh plan to track down the aircraft, Reuters reports.

The renewed interest comes as families of the deceased passengers mark the fifth anniversary of the aircrafts’s mysterious disappearance on March 8, 2014.

“If there are any credible leads or specific proposals…. we are more than willing to look at them and we are prepared to discuss with them the new proposals,” said Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was carrying 239 people when it went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Pieces of debris washing up along the Indian Ocean coastline narrowed previous searches but did not lead to the site of the wreckage. A $141 million underwater effort by Malaysia, China and Australia was called off in January 2017 after it made little progress.

A second, three-month hunt by U.S. exploration f..

China has its sights on sending a rover to the Red Planet in 2020, the head of the country’s lunar exploration program said Sunday.

“Next year, China will launch its Mars probe which is expected to encircle, land on and explore the Mars,” Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program, said ahead of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, China’s top political advisory body.

“We hope all the youngsters in our country could devote themselves to this great cause,” he added in a video translated by state news agency Xinhua.

The announcement comes just days after China opened a Mars simulation camp for tourists in Qinghai Province in the country’s northwest.

Beijing has recently made huge leaps in the space race. The announcement of plans to visit Mars comes just a month after China became the first country to land a rover on the far side of the moon, buoying its reputation in space exploration.

“This is a first for humanity and an impressive accomplish..

(DAHUK, Iraq) — Baseh Hammo was 38 when she was enslaved by militants of the Islamic State group. Raped and abused, she was sold 17 times among members of the so-called “caliphate,” and moved from city to city across a vast stretch of territory IS once controlled in northern Iraq and Syria.

Her ordeal came to an end in January in the Syrian village of Baghouz, when an IS member took pity on her as the final battle loomed with U.S.-led Syrian Kurdish forces. He put her on a truck with his own family and allowed them to leave the village. She was picked up by Syrian Kurdish forces and reunited with her two daughters in Iraq a few days later.

Yet many Yazidis, followers of a minority faith, are still missing, five years after IS militants stormed Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq’s Sinjar region and abducted women and children. Women were forced into sexual slavery, and boys were taken to be indoctrinated in jihadi ideology.

Hopes surged last month during a two-week pause in the U.S.-l..