When the English Defense League sprang to life two years ago, it had fewer than 50 members — a rough-and-tumble bunch of mostly white guys shouting from a street corner about what they viewed as uncontrolled Muslim immigration.

Now, the far-right group mentioned by confessed Norway gunman Anders Behring Breivik as an inspiration says its ranks have swollen to more than 10,000 people, a spectacular rise its leaders attribute to the immense global power of Facebook and other social networking sites.

A fire at a Vietnamese shoe factory killed 17 people and seriously injured 21 others in the northern port city of Hai Phong, state-controlled media reported Saturday.

Thanh Nien newspaper quoted Bui Thi Them, one of the survivors, as saying the fire broke out Friday afternoon when welding sparks ignited roofing insulation. The welder was installing a lightening rod on the factory's tin roof in preparation for a tropical storm that is expected to hit northern Vietnam later Saturday.

Gunmen opened fire on a minibus carrying minority Shiite Muslims in southwestern Pakistan on Saturday, killing 11 of them in a sectarian attack, police said.

Two people were also wounded in the attack in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, senior police official Hamid Shakeel said.

Tens of thousands of Egyptians rallied in Cairo's central Tahrir Square on Friday seeking to unify their demands despite rifts over key issues between liberal activists and Islamist groups.

Protesters carrying banners, flags and umbrellas to shield them from the punishing Cairo sun filled the square in one of the largest demonstrations since the popular uprising pushed President Hosni Mubarak from power in February.

Vienna police have shut down an unusual cannabis "ring" — hemp growing along the Austrian capital's busy Ring Street encircling the city's center.

Alerted by a news article about the illegal crop, police officers on Friday plucked a 200-meter (yard) stretch of green space along the three-lane street clean of the offending plants.

Hit hard by the global economic crisis, the Gulf city of Dubai decided Friday not to bid for the 2020 Olympics and will focus instead on a possible candidacy for the 2024 Games.

A feasibility study found 70 percent of the infrastructure demands were already in place but that a "a bid would be better timed for 2024," the National Olympic Committee of the United Arab Emirates said.

"Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization" (Penguin Group), by Richard Miles: For ancient Romans, "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" had to be the wave of the future if they were to become the unrivaled masters of the Mediterranean and the lands on its shores. Look at a map.

Carthage, a colony of seagoing Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon, was strategically on the Mediterranean's south coast, halfway between its Middle East homeland and the entry to the Atlantic. It was building an empire of its own, subjecting tribes in North Africa, Spain and the big islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica.

A fugitive who taunted police on his Facebook page to 'catch me if you can. I'm in Brooklyn' has been arrested.

The Daily News says U.S. marshals and NYPD detectives tracked Victor Burgos down to an apartment in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood Monday night, sitting at a computer with his Facebook page open.

Want fries with that ... doughnut?

A food booth in Syracuse will unveil the "Big Kahuna Donut Burger" at this year's New York State Fair.

South Korean troops searched Friday for land mines that may have been dislodged by landslides and flooding that have killed dozens of people.

Torrential downfalls since Tuesday have severely disrupted life in Seoul and its surrounding areas, submerging streets filled with idled cars, flooding subway stations and forcing businesses to shut. At least 50 people have been killed.