Seventeen people were electrocuted during a freak accident at a large pre-Carnival parade, Brazilian police said Monday.

They said fireworks lit by partygoers caused a power line to fall on a tightly packed crowd dancing behind a large sound truck.

North Korea's military threatened Sunday to fire at South Korea, as Seoul prepared to start annual joint drills with U.S. troops — maneuvers Pyongyang says are a rehearsal for an invasion.

The North's military warned that it would shoot directly at South Korean border towns and destroy them if Seoul continued to allow activists to launch propaganda leaflets toward the communist country, Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said. The warning was conveyed to South Korea's military earlier Sunday, it said.

The U.N. Security Council moved as a powerful bloc Saturday to try to halt Libyan leader Moammer Gadhafi's deadly crackdown on protesters, slapping sanctions on him, his children and top associates.

Voting 15-0 after daylong discussions interrupted with breaks to consult with capitals back home, the council imposed an arms embargo and urged U.N. member countries to freeze the assets of Gadhafi, four of his sons and a daughter. The council also backed a travel ban on the Gadhafi family and close associates, including leaders of the revolutionary committees accused of much of the violence against opponents.

A New York City homeless man has been reunited with his daughter after 11 years, thanks to Twitter.

Daniel Morales was given a prepaid cell phone to create a Twitter account as part of a project on homeless people called Underheard in New York.

Papers relating to codebreaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing will go to a British museum after the National Heritage Memorial Fund stepped in to help buy them for the nation.

The government-backed fund said Friday it had donated more than 200,000 pounds ($320,000) to a campaign to stop the notes and scientific papers from going to a private buyer.

Hot flashes that bedevil many women in menopause might actually be a good thing, depending on when they strike, according to new data from a long-running government study.

Women who had hot flashes at the start of menopause but not later seemed to have a lower risk for heart attack and death than women who never had hot flashes, or those whose symptoms persisted long after menopause began.

The deputy to Osama bin Laden issued al-Qaida's second message since the Egyptian uprising, accusing the nation's Christian leadership of inciting interfaith tensions and denying that the terror network was behind last month's bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria that killed 21 and sparked protests.

The message Friday from Ayman al-Zawahri, the No. 2 leader of the terror network, comes amid renewed Muslim-Christian tension over the slaying of a Coptic priest and a dispute involving a monastery.

A powerful explosion at a Spanish military academy killed five soldiers and wounded three others on Thursday when a bomb disposal drill went awry, the Defense Ministry said.

Soldiers getting ready to deploy as peacekeepers with the U.N. mission in south Lebanon were carrying out an exercise involving a controlled detonation of anti-tank mines when the ordnance exploded before the soldiers could move a safe distance away, a ministry official.

Paraguay extradited three Lebanese men to the United States on Thursday — two on drug trafficking charges and another who faces trial in Philadelphia for allegedly selling stolen cell phones and used cars to raise funds for Hizbullah.

Paraguayan anti-drug trafficking agent Maria Mercedes Castineira told The Associated Press that the three men were put on a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration plane after being held for months in Paraguayan jails.

Iran's president said Wednesday he is certain the wave of unrest in the Middle East will spread to Europe and North America, bringing an end to governments he accused of oppressing and humiliating people.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose own country resorted to violence to disperse an opposition rally earlier this month, also condemned Libya's use of force against demonstrators, calling it "grotesque."