Today's World News covering, Africa, Europe, Middle East

Idris Elba has co-written a stage show about life in South Africa after Nelson Mandela, which will have its premiere in Manchester next summer.

A Lion Air Boeing 737 passenger plane with 189 people on board has crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

Morocco has decided to scrap winter time and will instead keep its clocks at summer time, GMT+1, all year around.

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The announcement comes less than two days before the clocks would have gone back by one hour on Sunday.

Avoiding the switch would save "an hour of natural light", Administrative Reform Minister Mohammed Ben Abdelkader told Maghreb Arabe Press.

The north African nation joins a number of others, mainly in Africa and Asia, which do not use daylight saving.

What is GMT?


Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the time measured on the Earth's zero degree line of longitude, or meridian.

This runs from the North Pole to the South Pole, passing through the Old Royal Observatory in the London suburb of Greenwich.

This line has been called the Greenwich Meridian since 1884, and it is from here that all terrestrial longitudes are measured and the world's time zones are calculated.

GMT remains constant throughout the year.

In the winter months, local time in the UK is the same as GMT, but in March, local time is moved forward one hour to British Summer Time (BST) until the end of October.

A number of other countries around the world also use this daylight savings measure and change their local times to take advantage of earlier sunrises.

Co-ordinated Universal Time, or UTC, is essentially the same as GMT, but UTC is measured by an atomic clock and is thus more accurate - by split seconds.

Source: bbc

A man suspected of killing 11 people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh has been charged with murder - in what is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in recent US history.

Saudi Arabia's foreign minister has said the suspects in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi would be prosecuted in Saudi Arabia.

A 56-year-old man has been arrested in Florida in connection with a mail-bombing campaign aimed at critics of US President Donald Trump.

A 55-year-old Turkish man is facing up to five years in jail for “preventing public officials from performing their duty”. His crime – phoning the police 45,210 times in just one year.

US millionaire Robert Durst, the subject of HBO documentary The Jinx, will stand trial for murdering a close friend in 2000, a judge has ordered.

An Israeli teenager has fallen to his death in California's Yosemite National Park while trying to take a selfie, reports say.

Three suspicious packages have been found in the US, two addressed to a top Democrat and one to a former senior intelligence official, US media say.

The Ministry of General Education in Zambia announced the cancellation of a mathematics examination after reports that the questions had leaked and were being zipped around on social media.

A 20-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly raping a 100-year-old grandmother at her home.

Authorities have now found two packages addressed to former Vice President Joe Biden that are similar in appearance and contain potential explosive devices that resemble the others sent earlier this week to prominent critics of President Donald Trump and CNN, a law enforcement official said Thursday

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The two packages, discovered at Delaware postal facilities, were removed late Thursday morning, law enforcement officials said.

Earlier Thursday, a suspicious package addressed to actor-director Robert De Niro was reported at the Manhattan building where his production company is based, and its marking and contents appear similar to the other pipe bomb packages, two law enforcement sources said.

The FBI said Thursday morning that the three packages are "similar in appearance to the others."

A manhunt is underway for the perpetrator behind the packages. Law enforcement authorities are treating the series of bombs as a domestic terror matter and are advising the public to remain vigilant.

The motive is unknown, but the recipients are all prominent targets of right-wing criticism and, in many cases, of Trump himself.

The package found at CNN's New York bureau in the Time Warner Center was addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan, city and local law enforcement officials said.

Devices sent to former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder, California Democratic Rep.

Maxine Waters and Democratic donor George Soros showed the presence of a sulfur substance, which could have exploded, a law enforcement official said.

The devices are believed to be pipe bombs, inherently unstable, and at risk of being set off just by handling.

The FBI's counterterrorism division is leading the investigation Thursday into the packages and the agency says it's possible additional packages were mailed to other locations.

Read also:'Explosive device' sent to Hillary Clinton and Obama
At the White House, Trump vowed Wednesday that "we will spare no resources or expense" to pursue the perpetrator.

Source: cnn