British airlines have put into effect measures to stop people with swine flu boarding flights in a bid to prevent the virus from spreading further. British Airways said there had been a "very small number of cases" where people who had checked in with symptoms of H1N1 had been advised not to travel after having medical checks. Virgin Atlantic also said victims would not be allowed to board one of its planes without a fit-to-fly certificate from their ...

Iason Athanasiadis' ordeal began at the airport, shortly after he checked in for his flight to leave Tehran. "I was heading to the gate," the Greek-British journalist said. "This guy materialized on my right. He said 'are you Iason Fowden' [Athanasiadis' passport name]. I said 'yeah that's me.' He said 'please step to the side ... you're not going to be flying tonight.'" It was an ominous introduction to Iran's security apparatus. Athanasiadis spent the next 21 harrowing days in ...

Provisional Honduran President Roberto Micheletti has accepted an offer that an independent commission help broker an impasse over whether to allow the return of ousted President Jose Manual Zelaya, Costa Rica's foreign ministry said Tuesday. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias offered to form a mediation panel with representatives from four or five countries. The development came as Zelaya, ousted by the Honduran military on June 28, met in Washington with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He is trying to ...

We arrived in Urumqi late Monday night from Beijing. It was a scramble to get a taxi from the airport because there were many passengers and fewer taxi operators than usual. The driver of the original taxi we'd booked could not come out of the city, he said, because many of the areas were blockaded. There was a dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed soon after the unrest and that was indeed obvious Tuesday morning. We were out on the streets at 6 ...

Deposed Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya landed in El Salvador late Sunday after a failed attempt to return to his homeland. Zelaya told the Venezuela-based news network Telesur that his jet was denied permission to land Sunday evening in the Honduran capital, where military vehicles were arrayed on the runway. At least one person was killed and eight wounded after security forces opened fire and used tear gas on several thousand protesters who ringed the airport, said Hugo ...

The gunshots echoed around the streets of this sweltering Central American capital like a firecrackers. Amid the onslaught of bullets on Sunday afternoon, hundreds of protesters ran for their lives, taking cover behind cinder-block walls or running into the homes of kindly residents. Five, 10, 15 minutes passed, and the automatic rifles kept going. Finally the smoke cleared to reveal the carnage: parts of the skull and brains of a teenage boy lay on the concrete; another bleeding man ...

Investigators have heard a signal from the flight data recorders of the Yemenia Airways plane that crashed last week, they announced Sunday. "A signal was picked up from two acoustic transmitters from the plane's flight data recorders during a sea search to locate the data recorders this morning," the French air accident investigation agency, known as the BEA, said in a statement. Commonly known as "black boxes," the data recorders should contain information to help determine what caused the crash. ...

Yemenia Airways is canceling all its flights between Yemen and the Comoros Islands after this week's crash on the same route, the airline said Saturday. One more flight between Sanaa and Moroni is scheduled for Sunday, but all flights on the route are canceled after that, Yemenia said. A Yemenia Airways Airbus 310 went down early Tuesday, carrying 142 passengers and 11 crew members. It originated in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, and went down just miles from Comoros' capital, Moroni. ...

It has been a rocky couple of weeks for the Republican Party as high-profile, traditional-values politicians have faced embarrassing sex scandals. First it was Sen. John Ensign, R-Nevada, who admitted in a news conference two weeks ago to having an affair with a former staffer. Then, last week, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford trumped Ensign. After days in which his whereabouts were unknown by his wife and staff (who thought he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail), Sanford held ...

Infomercial pitchman Billy Mays died at his Tampa, Florida, home Sunday morning, authorities told CNN. The 50-year-old known for his shouting OxiClean ads was pronounced dead at 7:45 a.m. The Hillsborough County medical examiner will perform an autopsy, Tampa police Lt. Brian Dugan said. Mays was on the US Airways flight from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Tampa on Saturday that had a hard landing at Tampa International Airport when the plane's front tire blew out. There were no reported injuries on ...