World news round up January to July 2012

A round up of the world's biggest news stories in the first half of 2012

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM (DECEMBER 31, 2011/JANUARY 1, 2012)(ITN) - 

JANUARY

London welcomed the New Year with a spectacular firework display around the LondonEye on January 1. After Big Ben chimed midnight the Thames River around the LondonEye was lit up by one of the best fireworks displays witnessed in the capital city in recent years.Up to 16 people were killed and an estimated 36 were wounded in two bomb blasts in the Iraqi capital's Shi'ite suburb of Kadhimya on January 5.

Thirty-two people were killed on January 13 after an Italian cruise ship carrying more than 4,000 people ran aground and keeled over close to the Italian coast.

A rescue operation involving lifeboats, ships and helicopters was continuing hours after the 114,500-tonne Costa Concordia hit a sandbar near the island of Giglio. Photographs showed a large gash along its side.

The multi-storey luxury vessel settled on its side, partly submerged, just a few hundred metres (yards) from the shore.

The ship's captain Francesco Schettino was arrested as authorities investigated the cause of the accident.

At least six people were killed in a string of bomb blasts on January 20 in Nigeria's second city Kano and the authorities imposed a curfew across the city, which has been plagued by an insurgency led by the Islamist sect Boko Haram.

Libyan fighters who helped topple former president Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 battled Gaddafi loyalists who had taken control of his former bastion of Bani Walid on January 23.

The country's ramshackle government lost control of the city after local people staged an armed uprising, posing the gravest challenge yet to the country's new rulers.

Accounts from Bani Walid, a town about 200 km (120 miles) from Tripoli, described armed Gaddafi supporters attacking the barracks of the pro-government militia in the town and then forcing them to retreat.

Amateur footage posted on social network sites in January purported to show evidence of continued unrest in Syria.

Homs became the heart of a growing insurgency in Syria, where Assad's forces have been trying to crush what began as peaceful protests in March 2011.

Activists estimate that a third of all fatalities on both sides of the conflict have occurred inHoms.

Syria has been plagued by rising sectarian tensions between its Sunni Muslim majority, backbone of the uprising, and the Alawite minority sect.

There have been several cases of kidnappings and killings based on religious identity, particularly in lawless Homs.

In Myanmar thousands of people lined the roads shouting "Long live mother Suu" as Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's motorcade moved through the rural coastal township of Dawei about 615 km (380 miles) south of her home city, Yangon, the main business centre, on January 29.

The trip, to garner support ahead of April by-elections, is only Suu Kyi's fourth outsideYangon since her release from years of house arrest in November 2010, demonstrates the increasingly central role of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate as the Southeast Asian state emerges from half a century of isolation.

The NLD, though well known in the country, has had limited real political experience.

It won by a landslide a 1990 election, a year after Suu Kyi began a lengthy period of incarceration, but the hen regime ignored the result and detained many party members and supporters.

FEBRUARY

Summer flooding inundated towns in east Australia in early February, stranding thousands of people and affecting the coal mining industry and agriculture.

More than 11,000 people in the town of Moree in the north of New South Wales were isolated by the flooding and thousands were evacuated, according to emergency services authorities.

The country's new disaster came a year after devastating floods across all four ofAustralia's eastern states. Rescue workers said river levels in some areas hit levels not seen for half a century.

Bombers targeted staff at Israel's embassies in India and Georgia on February 13, a bomb exploded in New Delhi but a second device in Tbilisi defused.

Indian police said a bomb hit an embassy car and wounded a woman.

Israel had put its foreign missions on especially high alert ahead of the 12th anniversary of the assassination, in 2008, of the military mastermind of Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, linked to the Shi'ite Islamist group Hezbollah, Imad Moughniyeh.

Crowds of relatives gathered outside a Honduran jail on February 15, waiting to hear if their loved ones were among 350 victims killed in a deadly prison fire.

The attorney general's office said 357 people died in the blaze that began during the night at the prison in Comayagua, about 75 km (45 miles) north of the capitalTegucigalpa.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said on February 17 that Russian special operations forces killed an entire group of militants responsible for attacks on police.

Russian state television news channels showed video of the operation in Russia's turbulent North Caucasus region, where authorities have been battling with three rebel groups for five days.

In a desperate bid for information regarding their loved ones, hundreds of family members gathered outside a prison facility in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey on February 19 after a riot erupted between inmates, leaving dozens dead.

Worried and angry relatives surrounded the prison with some attempting to break down entry gates to the jail. Keen to avoid an escalation in tensions, police converged on the facility to secure its surrounds.

Greece's government met on February 21 to finalise details of economic reforms to be passed in parliament that helped Greece receive its second bailout loan from its international partners.

Prime Minister Lucas Papademos and cabinet ministers met before submitting a bill to parliament on the reduction of pensions, the minimum wage and health spending, part of the next wave of measures tied to the 130-billion-euro EU/IMF bailout, that won their country a last-minute reprieve from bankruptcy at the price of a decade of austerity and foreign scrutiny of national finances.

A packed commuter train plowed into the buffers at a Buenos Aires station on February 22 during morning rush hour. More than 600 people were injured in Argentina's worst rail accident in more than 30 years.

Dozens were trapped when the impact of the collision propelled the second train car into the first carriage.

Officials at first said the accident was likely caused by faulty brakes, but Transport Minister Juan Pablo Schiavi said the train appeared to be braking properly until it entered the station.

Protests against the burning of copies of Islam's most holy book drew thousands of angry Afghans to the streets in February, chanting "Death to America!" in violence that killed 11 people and wounded many more.

The Taliban urged Afghans to target foreign military bases and kill Westerners in retaliation for the Koran burning at Bagram airfield, later directing its plea to the security forces, calling on them to "turn their guns on the foreign infidel invaders," it said on its site shahamat-english.com.

The Koran burnings at the vast Bagram base north of Kabul, which the United Stateshas said were unintentional, could make it even more difficult for U.S.-led NATO forces to win the hearts and minds of Afghans and bring the Taliban to the negotiating table ahead of the withdrawal of foreign combat troops by the end of 2014.

Bradley Manning, the suspected source of the largest leak of classified U.S. documents in history appeared in court on February 23.

Manning was formally charged with 22 counts including aiding the enemy, wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the Internet and theft of public property.

MARCH

Violent storms and tornadoes left trails of destruction in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast, killing at least 36 people in four states, authorities said on March 3.

The fast-moving twisters spawned by massive thunderstorms splintered blocks ofhomes, damaged a prison and schools and tossed around vehicles like toys across the region, leaving 18 people dead in Kentucky, 14 in neighboring Indiana, three more inOhio, and one in Alabama

Two massive solar flares -- ranked as X-class storms, the most powerful -- erupted in March, astronomers reported.

The first flare occurred on March 4 and the second on March 6. The resulting ejections of plasma, known as coronal mass ejections (CME), was thought could possibly interfere with orbiting transmission satellites and could have caused outages on global positioning systems and other devices. Fluctuations to some electrical power grids had also been expected.

Video emerged in March of tens of thousands of Bahrainis taking to the streets to demand democratic reforms, stepping up pressure on the U.S.-allied government in the biggest protest yet in a year of unrest.

The protest which took place on March 9 started along a highway near Manama after the protesters responded to a call from leading Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Isa Qassim, who urged people to renew their calls for greater democracy.

Sixteen Afghan civilians were killed in a shooting spree by a US soldier on March 11, inAfghanistan's southern Kandahar province

The incident came just weeks after U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Koran at a NATO base, triggering widespread anti-Western protests, and plunging already strained U.S.-Afghan ties to a new low.

A ferry carrying more than 250 passengers sank in a river in Bangladesh on March 13 after colliding with a barge and at least 35 people were killed.

The accident occurred on the Meghna river in Munshiganj district, some 50 km (31 miles) south of the capital. At least 50 people managed to swim ashore, an official said.

Rebekah Brooks, a former editor and close confidante of Rupert Murdoch, was arrested for a second time on March 13 in a phone-hacking scandal that rocked the British establishment and embarrassed Prime Minister David Cameron.

A stream of allegations and arrests shook News Corp and damaged police andpoliticians from all major political parties, revealing the extremely close ties between the media and elements of the political and police establishment.

The 168-year-old News of the World was shut down in July 2011 at the height of the scandal.

Two large explosions hit Damascus on March 17, killing several security force personnel and civilians, state television reported, blaming what it said were terrorists behind the year-long uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

At the scene of the first blast at an intelligence centre, the front of the building was blown away and numerous burnt out cars littered the streets below.

A group of media brought to the scene, on a road that links Baghdad and Qassa'a streets in Damascus, witnessed security forces exchange fire with what appeared to be armed gunmen.

The second bomb targeted a police building, with television showing the smouldering wreckage of a car at the site, and what appeared to be at a charred corpse inside the mangled shell.

In France, a gunman on a motorbike shot dead at least four people, including three children, at a Jewish school in Toulouse on March 19, just days after three soldiers were killed in similar shootings in the same area.

The gunman was killed in a firefight with special forces in a siege at his home three days later.

A large force of ambulances, helicopters and rescue officials was deployed overnight on March 13 to rescue the victims of Belgian school party whose bus crashed in a Swiss mountain tunnel killing 28 people, including 22 children.

The bus, transporting 52 people, mostly school children aged about 12 from the towns of Lommel and Heverlee in Belgium's Dutch-speaking Flanders region, crashed in the Swiss canton of Valais.

The bus was returning to Belgium from a skiing holiday camp in Val d'Anniviers, a resort in the Valais Alps that border France.

Renegade Malian soldiers went on state television on March 22 to declare they had seized power in protest at the government's failure to quell a nomad-led rebellion in the north.

The coup has been fronted by soldiers of the rank of captain or lower and, if successful, will add a new layer of insecurity to a Saharan region battling local al Qaeda agents and a flood of weapons trafficked from Libya since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.

APRIL

Europe's tallest and most active volcano, Mount Etna, erupted for the fifth time in 2012, spewing hot lava and ash in the early hours of April 1.

Ash from the eruption landed on the villages at the foot of the volcano Ansa said. However, no damage was reported and nearby airports remained open.

Pakistani soldiers battled on April 8 to rescue 124 soldiers and 11 civilians trapped under an avalanche.

The soldiers from the 6 Northern Light Infantry Battalion and the civilian army employees were trapped at an altitude of 15,000 feet (4,500 metres) near the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram mountain range in Pakistan.

Helicopter rescue teams and troops on the ground with sniffer dogs were racing against time to reach those who had been trapped and specialist rescuers from Switzerland andGermany helped the rescue effort.

North Korea held a ceremony for its eternal President Kim Il-sung on Saturday (April 14), the eve of his 100th birthday celebrations and a day after the failure of a much-hyped rocket launch.

Over 50,000 people cheered and clapped in Pyongyang's Kim Il-sung stadium as Kim Jong-un, Kim Il-sung's grandson, walked out onto the balcony waving.

Kim Jong-un became leader of the reclusive state when his father Kim Jong-il died in December and had recently received the country's top military post, completing his rise to power.

The rocket, which North Korea said would launch a satellite but which the U.S and its allies called a disguised ballistic missile test, is thought to have landed in the sea minutes after taking off.

It has not been mentioned in official public events held since.

Gunmen launched multiple attacks in the Afghan capital Kabul on April 15, assaulting Western embassies in the heavily guarded, central diplomatic area and at the parliament in the west, witnesses and officials said.

Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the assault, one of the boldest on the capital since U.S.-backed Afghan forces removed the group from power in 2001.

The Taliban said their main targets were the German and British embassies and the headquarters of Afghanistan's NATO-led force.

After accusing its neighbor South Sudan of occupying their territory, Sudan deployed forces to Heglig to retake their oil rich region on April 18.

Fears of an all out war after between Sudan and South Sudan were heightened after the newly-independent South seized Heglig, but later eased after they said they were going to withdraw their troops.

Tensions rose since South Sudan split away from Sudan as an independent country in July, under the terms of a 2005 deal, taking with it most of the country's known oil reserves.

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a Russia-European drafted resolution on April 21 that authorised an initial deployment of up to 300 unarmed military observers to Syria for three months to monitor a fragile ceasefire.

The vote came hours after U.N. ceasefire monitors visited the Syrian city of Homs after months of bombardment.

Opposition activists in Homs, epicentre of the 13-month-old revolt against PresidentBashar al-Assad, said shelling and gunfire stopped for the first time in weeks before Syrian authorities let the monitors into the city.

A handful of monitors has been in the country for a week as an advance party while diplomats hammered out the mandate for a force of hundreds. During that time, a ceasefire has so far failed to end violence in the worst-hit parts of the country.

Amateur video footage posted on the Internet showed the monitors, clad in turquoise bullet-proof vests, being escorted by hordes of opposition residents through rubble-filled streets. A separate video purportedly showed violence in the district of Masha al-Arbeenin Hama, with sounds of gunfire heard in the background.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the contents of the videos, which were obtained from a social media website.

A United Nations-backed court convicted former Liberian president Charles Taylor of war crimes on April 26, the first time an African head of state has been found guilty by an international tribunal.

Taylor was charged with 11 counts of murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, during which more than 50,000 people were killed.

Several hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters took to the streets of downtown Manhattan on April 27 in a weekly march which saw the group make its way from its designated gathering point of Zuccotti Park, dubbed by the group "Liberty Square", to theNew York Stock Exchange.

The march was relatively peaceful, but that didn't stop a handful of protesters from being arrested for ignoring police orders to keep clear of certain public areas.

The Shuttle Enterprise, riding on top of a NASA jumbo jet airplane, travelled from Washington DC on April 27, and headed for New York's Kennedy International Airport.

Arriving in New York, locals and tourists enjoyed a view of the shuttle and jumbo jet as it flew at a low altitude past New York's iconic State of Liberty, and the Manhattan skyline.

Enterprise, a space shuttle prototype, was previously housed at the Smithsonian Institute. It's new home will be the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.

MAY

Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi took her place in Myanmar's parliament on May 2, ushering in a historic new political era after nearly a quarter-century fight against military dictatorship.

The 66-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate waded through throngs of foreign and local reporters as she entered parliament in Naypyitaw to join a fragile new political system after 49 years of oppressive army rule.

Suu Kyi and 33 members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) party who swept by-elections on April 1 took their seats after backing down from a demand to change the wording of the oath that new members take. Three more will join them in the lower house later.

Tens of thousands of members of Spain's Indignados (Indignant) movement and their supporters demonstrated in Spain on May 12 to celebrate the anniversary of the world famous protest on May 15 last year where thousands took to the streets to protest against the financial crisis and political parties.

In Madrid, crowds gathered in the central square of Puerta de Sol in a festive atmosphere but the sheer size of the demonstration was a clear expression of the discontent many feel as a result of the government's austerity measures.

In Mexico, authorities found the dismembered bodies of 37 people stuffed into bags and dumped on a highway near the northern industrial city of Monterrey on May 13, in what appeared to be part of a string of brutal drug gang killings.

The bodies were found in the early hours on a highway, sparking a large deployment of local, state and military officials to the scene.

Francois Hollande officially became France's first Socialist president in 17 years as outgoing president Nicolas Sarkozy left the Elysee Palace for the last time on May 15.

Hollande walked up the red carpet at the start of the ceremony as the self-styled MrNormal, but finished it as the seventh president of France's Fifth Republic.

Sarkozy handed over the levers of power including the country's nuclear codes and other secret dossiers, before bidding his successor goodbye on the steps of the Palace and leaving with his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic, 70, appeared in court on May 16 for his genocide trial looking confident and composed.

He was formally charged with commanding the 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica and could be imprisoned for life if found guilty by judges at the U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

In Yemen, a uniformed man blew himself up in the midst of a military parade rehearsal attended by senior officials in the Yemeni capital San on May 21, killing at least 63 people and wounding more than 60, a police source said.

Yemen's defence minister and chief of staff were present at the event but were not hurt in the blast, a military source said.

The Libyan convicted of the 1988 bombing of a PanAm flight over Lockerbie was buried on May 21 in a quiet ceremony that Libyans hope will allow them to leave behind the controversy that surrounded him in life.

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who always said he was not responsible for bringing down the jumbo jet on the Scottish town and killing 270 people, died in his bed in Tripoli on May 20 surrounded by family.

His release from jail in 2009 caused huge controversy in Britain and the United States, where most of the victims were from. But his death, at 60, from cancer, barely made the television news in Libya, where people are focused on reconstruction after overthrowingMuammar Gaddafi in a NATO-backed war last year.

Mali's caretaker president Dioncounda Traore was beaten up and hospitalised after hundreds of protesters stormed his palace on May 21 to demand his resignation, officials and several protesters said.

A spokesman for the soldiers behind a March 22 coup said Traore's close-protection officers had killed three people in the attack, in which protesters entered parts of the palace compound unopposed and tore up pictures of Traore.

Mali is struggling to cope with the aftermath of the coup and a subsequent rebellion in its desert north. Captain Amadou Sanogo, who led the military coup, agreed at the weekend to drop objections to Traore remaining in charge but crowds took to the streets on Monday calling for him to quit.

JUNE

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison on June 2 after being convicted of ordering the killings of anti-government protesters last year but the sentence, short of a death penalty, and his acquittal of corruption charges sparked outrage and scuffles in the courtroom.

Many Egyptians had expected the former strongman to receive a light sentence and were bracing for bigger protests as a result, but his life sentence appeased some of his critics outside the court.

Tens of thousands of people lined the river Thames at Battersea on June 3 to watch the start of the Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant.

A thousand vessels of all shapes and sizes took part in the flotilla, which set off from Chelsea in central London bound for the iconic Tower Bridge.

The Queen and the rest of the royal family embarked her royal barge - a transformed luxury cruiser named the Spirit of Chartwell - at Cadogan Pier opposite leafy Battersea Park.

A Canadian man suspected of murdering and dismembering a Chinese student, then posting a video of the crime online, was arrested in an internet cafe in Berlin on June 4 after an international manhunt.

Interpol had issued a "red notice," the highest type of warning, for Luka Rocco Magnotta, who faces first degree murder charges for killing the student. He is later believed to have mailed his victim's body parts to political parties in the Canadian capital Ottawa.

Myanmar pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi started her second day in Osloon June 16 with a visit to the Nobel Institute where she signed the Nobel Protocol.

Suu Kyi met with Nobel Institute Director Geir Lundestad before a ceremony in which she gave an acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded 21 years ago in absentia.

There were wild celebrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square on June 24 where tens of thousands of Egyptians gathered to rejoice at the election of Muslim Brotherhoodcandidate Mohamed Morsy, the first freely elected president in Egypt's history.

Tahrir Square was the centre of the revolutions that last year saw the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted after a popular revolt against his rule.

World powers began two days of talks with Iran on June 18 to try to end a decade-long stand-off over Tehran's nuclear programme and avert the threat of a new war in theMiddle East.

EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton and Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Saeed Jalili met in the Russian Foreign Ministry, as the six powers - the P5+1 group of United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany - hoped to persuade Iran to curb production of high-grade uranium which they suspect is a step towards making nuclear weapons.

The leader of Greece's conservative New Democracy party, Antonis Samaras, was sworn in as prime minister by President Karolos Papoulias on June 20 after receiving a mandate to form a government.

Samaras formed a coalition government with the backing of the Socialist PASOK and the smaller Democratic Left parties.

The last Greek election failed to produce a government after parties supporting and opposing the international bailout could not agree to cooperate.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth shook the hand of former Irish Republican Army (IRA) commander Martin McGuinness for the first time on June 27, drawing a line under a conflict that cost the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians, including that of her cousin.

The meeting with McGuinness, who is now the deputy first minister of British-controlledNorthern Ireland, comes 14 years after the IRA ended its war against Britain's claim to the province, and is one of the last big milestones in a peace process whose success has been studied around the world.

JULY

Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), won the Mexican presidential election in July, and brought the party that dominated the country for most of the past century back to power.

Backed by his good looks, powerful connections and the strongest political machinery in the country, Nieto led polls in the race to win the Mexican presidency for more than 2 1/2 years even though he only formally became a candidate a few months before winning the election.

Scores of students took to the streets of Mexico City in protest on at the election result on July 2, after Mexican electoral officials confirmed that Nieto had won the hotly-contested poll.

The "Yo Soy 132" ("I Am 132") student movement, which some analysts have dubbed "The Mexican Spring", shut down Mexico City's main thoroughfares as they marched towards the capital's iconic Revolution Monument shouting slogans denouncing the national vote as a fraud.

Some of the heaviest rain in years left thousands of families displaced and nearly 100 dead in northern Bangladesh where the Bramaputra and Jamuna rivers overflowed with water in July.

Many families were seen carrying their belongings away from the flood area and some set-up makeshift homes on the other side of the embankment.

Villagers had to join forces to build walls using sand bags to stop the gushing water from causing further damage to their homes.

The Ohi nuclear plant in Western Japan went back online on July 1, the first nuclear reactor to be restarted since the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The government approved the restart of the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the Ohi plant to avert a potential summer power crunch, sparking street protests in cities around Japan.

About 100 protesters with more than a dozen vehicles blocked a road near the Ohi plant, and thousands others took to the streets in Tokyo.

All the country's nuclear reactors were shut down for maintenance and then underwent safety checks to see if they could withstand an earthquake and tsunami similar to the disaster that overwhelmed Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi plant last year, causing the worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.

Before the Fukushima crisis, Japan relied on nuclear power for about 30 percent of its electricity and was the world's third-biggest user after the United States and France.

Floods and landslides killed at least 103 people in southern Russia after two months' average rainfall fell in a few hours on July 7, forcing some residents to climb onto roofs and into trees to save themselves.

Many victims were elderly people who were asleep in the town of Krymsk when the storm broke overnight. They drowned as the torrential rain turned hilly streets in the agricultural region of Krasnodar into driving torrents.

Water rose above head-height in what one official called the worst flooding for 70 years.

Libyans began voting in their first free national election in 60 years on July 7, a poll designed to shake off the legacy of Muammar Gaddafi but which risks being hijacked by autonomy demands in the east and unrest in the desert south.

The election was closely watched around the world by both supporters and critics of NATO's bombing campaign that helped underpin an "Arab Spring" uprising which ended Gaddafi's dictatorship and finally claimed his life.

In Poland, one person was killed and 10 others were injured when a wave of tornadoes ripped through the north of the country in July.

Amateur video showed a tornado eddying through the town of Sztum.

The hardest hit localities were in the Baltic region of Pomerania and two neighbouring provinces, where trees were uprooted, buildings damaged and power lines downed.

Four hundred hectares of woodlands in the Tuchola Forest area were also flattened.

The only known fatality was a sixty-year-old man crushed to death by a collapsing building in the village of Wycinki.

At least 35 pilgrims, most of them from India, were killed when a bus plunged into an irrigation canal in southwest Nepal on July 15.

Police said ten people were rescued after the crowded bus plunged into the water nearthe Hindu pilgrimage site of Triveni, 100 km (62 miles) southwest of Kathmandu.

The canal was drained as police searched for survivors.

A bomb planted by the Taliban destroyed 22 NATO trucks carrying supplies to their forces in northern Afghanistan on Wednesday July 18.

Eighteen fuel trucks and four supply vehicles were parked in Aibak, the capital ofSamangan province, when a bomb ripped through them, one person was wounded, local police said.

At least six Israeli tourists were killed on July 18, in an explosion on a bus outside a Bulgarian airport that Israel blamed on Tehran.

Footage aired by regional Bulgarian broadcaster TV7 showed the gutted remains of the tourist bus. The windows of the double decker were blown out and surrounded by scorch marks. Mangled metal hung from its torn-back roof and clouds of dense black smoke smoke billowed above the airport in the Black Sea resort of Burgas.

The explosion came on the 18th anniversary of a 1994 bomb attack on the headquarters of Argentina's main Jewish organisation by an Iranian-backed Hezbollah suicide bomber, which killed 85 people.

A ferry with more than 250 people on board, including some foreigners, capsized and sank between the east African coast and the Zanzibar archipelago on July 18, killing at least 31 people, police said.

Police Commissioner Mussa Ali Mussa said 145 people had been rescued.

The ferry, MV Skagit/Kalama, had set sail from mainland Tanzania at around midday forZanzibar, Tanzania's semi autonomous archipelago and a popular tourist destination.

Dramatic television footage showed many survivors clinging to debris in the water and swimming to rescue boats as rescuers plucked them from the water.

In the United States on July 20, a gunman, identified by police as James Holmes, carried an assault rifle, shotgun and handgun into a packed midnight premiere screening of the Batman film "Dark Knight Rises".

Holmes opening fire, spraying the room with bullets and killing 12 people, he was was arrested in a parking lot behind the cinema moments after the shooting spree.

In Iraq, a car bomb ripped through a marketplace carpark in the town of Mahmudiya, 30 km (20 miles) south of the Iraqi capital Baghdad on July 22.

Eleven people were killed and wounded 38 in the town after three car bombs went off in quick succession. The second blast detonated after police arrived at the scene, and was followed by a third at the town's police station, police sources said.

Although violence in Iraq has eased since a peak in 2006-2007 when tens of thousands were killed, insurgents still carry out deadly attacks, especially around the capital.