DOHA: Hamas today rejected a ceasefire to end 16 days of deadly fighting with Israel unless the blockade on the Gaza Strip is lifted, its chief Khaled Meshaal said in Doha.

KHARKIV: Bodies and the flight recorders from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, destroyed by a missile last week over eastern Ukraine, were delivered safely from rebel control to this northeast Ukrainian city on Tuesday. Forensics officials raised the strong possibility that the remains of many victims still were buried in the wreckage and that identification work could take weeks or months to complete.

WASHINGTON: Senior US intelligence officials said on Tuesday that Russia was responsible for "creating the conditions" that led to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, but they offered no evidence of direct Russian government involvement.

MAIDUGURI: A raid on an army base in northeast Nigeria and massacres of civilians in nearby villages at the weekend have left Boko Haram free to move unopposed in a strategic garrison town, witnesses and security sources said.

UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations security council on Monday condemned the downing of a Malaysian passenger plane in Ukraine with 298 people on board and demanded that armed groups allow "safe, secure, full and unrestricted access" to the crash site.

KABUL: Three foreign advisers and an Afghan interpreter were killed on Tuesday in a suicide bomb attack outside Kabul international airport, police said.

CAIRO: With high hopes but low expectations, the US stepped up calls Monday for an international push to end fighting in the Gaza Strip as President Barack Obama sent his top envoy to the Mideast to help broker a new ceasefire between Israel and Hamas militants — the third since 2009.

CHENNAI: Four people, including two civil engineers from Singapore, died when the SUV they were travelling in collided with a lorry on GST Road on Sunday.

SEOUL: North Korea's top military body today defended its recent missile tests as a legitimate exercise in self-defence, and said South Korean and US charges of provocation were malicious and hypocritical.

TOREZ: Pro-Moscow rebels piled nearly 200 bodies from the downed Malaysian jetliner into four refrigerated boxcars on Sunday in eastern Ukraine, and cranes at the crash scene moved big chunks of the Boeing 777, drawing condemnation from Western leaders that the rebels were tampering with the site.