TOKYO: Two Japanese cabinet ministers visited a controversial war shrine in Tokyo today in a move likely to anger China and South Korea, which see it as a symbol of Japan's militarist past.

 DONETSK UKRAINE: Artillery shells hit close to the centre of Ukraine's separatist-held city of Donetsk for the first time on Thursday, killing at least one person, as a large Russian aid convoy rumbled towards the border.

WASHINGTON: A US company that makes an experimental drug for treating the often deadly Ebola virus said on Monday that it has sent all its available supplies to West Africa.

GAZA/JERUSALEM: Israeli fire killed at least 21 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip early on Wednesday as the Jewish state said it targeted Islamist militants at dozens of sites across the coastal enclave, while Egyptian mediators prepared a revised ceasefire proposal.

ATLANTA: The last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, hastening the end of World War II and forcing the world into the atomic age, has died in Georgia.

WASHINGTON: He may be the most powerful man in the world, but when it comes to sending his daughter away to college in some distant university town, President Obama is like any other parent: worried — and weepy.

WASHINGTON: The US has asked Russia to stop the flow of heavy weapons like rocket launchers and artillery from the country into strife-torn Ukraine.

UNITED NATIONS: The UN security council has called for "an immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire" in the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas.

YAOUNDE: The wife of Cameroon's vice-prime minister was kidnapped and at least three people were killed in an attack by Boko Haram militants on in the northern town of Kolofata on Sunday, Cameroon officials said.

RAQQA (Syria): When his factory was bombed in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, the businessman considered two bleak options: to remain at home and risk dying in the next airstrike or flee like hundreds of thousands of others to a refugee camp in Turkey.