U.S. President Barack Obama said Thursday he had not known about abuses by tax officials who targeted conservative groups until a report into the affair was leaked to the press last week.

President Barack Obama said on Thursday he reserved the right to resort to both diplomatic and military options to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad but insisted that U.S. action alone would not be enough to resolve the Syrian crisis.

Bombs tore through markets in Baghdad and a suicide attacker blew himself up in a mosque in northern Iraq in violence across the country on Thursday that killed at least 25 people and extended a surge in sectarian-tinged bloodshed.

Washington's top tax official was fired on Wednesday as President Barack Obama sought to stem a rising tide of criticism over the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups for special scrutiny.

The White House released 100 pages of emails Wednesday designed to defuse Republican claims of a cover-up over the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi last year that killed four Americans.

rney General Eric Holder told Congress Wednesday that a serious national security leak required the secret gathering of telephone records at The Associated Press as he stood by an investigation in which he insisted he had no involvement.

Ninety-seven percent of scientists say global warming is mainly man-made but a wide public belief that experts are divided is making it harder to gain support for policies to curb climate change, an international study showed on Thursday.

Prestigious jeweler Harry Winston, which was acquired earlier this year by Swatch Group, bought a new colorless, flawless 101.73-carat diamond for a record US$26.7 million at an auction in Geneva on Wednesday, auction house Christie's said.

ish embassies were asked if they could silence a cockerel and order an unfit husband to shape up, among other “bizarre” requests for help in the last 12 months, the Foreign Office said Thursday.

Economic losses from disasters since 2000 are in the range of US$2.5 trillion, a figure at least 50 percent higher than previous international estimates, according to a U.N. report released Wednesday.