Europe

The minister, Omran al-Zoubi, said in a rare comment from Damascus, that the migrants are mostly fleeing from areas held by rivals of President Bashar Assad's government, including the Islamic State group.

His remarks, carried by state media, say European countries, "which sent terrorists" to Syria and imposed economic sanctions on the Syrian people, must take responsibility for their anti-Syria policies.

An update to Facebook's Moments app today (August 25) includes a Flipagram-like option to turn six or more of your photos into a musical collage.

However, the app still won't be coming to the UK or Europe any time soon because of privacy concerns.

With Moments using facial recognition technology to share photos with those pictured, the slightly invasive nature of the app has thrown up a few barriers here in Blighty.

The Swedish ship Poseidon was already rescuing 130 migrants from a raft north of Libya's coast when it got a call to assist a nearby wooden ship, authorities said. The Swedes rescued 439 survivors from the wooden boat then looked for the bodies.

"We had to cut up the deck of the wooden boat to get to (the bodies) in a safe way," Swedish coast guard spokesman Mattias Lindholm told The Associated Press.

Archaeologists who painstakingly examined the bones of some 26 men, women and children buried in the Stone Age grave site at Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten, near Frankfurt, say they found blunt force marks to the head, arrow wounds and deliberate efforts to smash at least half of the victims' shins — either to stop them from running away or as a grim message to survivors.

 Major markets in Europe and Asia made gains, while the U.S. stock market finished with a slight loss.

Officials from China's central bank defended recent moves to loosen the government's grip on its currency, saying that the yuan will eventually rebound from its recent fall. There is "no basis for persistent and substantial devaluation," said a deputy central bank governor, Zhang Xiaohui. The yuan is close to "market levels" after two days of sharp drops, Zhang said.