Singapore's smog crisis from Indonesian forest fires worsened Wednesday as air pollution levels reached a 16-year high, triggering a run on medical masks and angry complaints from foreign tourists and locals. The city-state's Pollutant Standards Index soared to 172 at mid-afternoon, well past the officially designated "unhealthy" threshold of 100, according to the National Environment Agency (NEA) website.

OTTAWA - Refugee numbers around the world are at their highest level since 1994, the United Nations refugee agency reported Tuesday in a sobering look at global displacement. More than 45.2 million people either fled their own countries or were internally displaced in 2012, compared to 42.5 million the year before, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in its annual global trends report. War remained the dominant reason for displacement — 55 per cent of all refugees came from five war-affected countries: Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Sudan.

BERLIN - Five years and 50 years. As President Barack Obama revisits Berlin, he can't escape those anniversaries and the inevitable comparisons to history and personal achievement. His 26-hour whirlwind visit to the German capital caps three days of international summitry for the president and marks his return to a place where he once summoned a throng of 200,000 to share his ambitious vision for American leadership.

More than six thousand people were evacuated overnight in central Russia after a series of massive explosions at an arms depot blew out windows and sparked a fire, the emergency situations ministry said Wednesday. The blasts began Tuesday night and continued for hours after being sparked by efforts to dispose of munitions at an arms depot close to the town of Chapayevsk in the Samara region around 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from Moscow. The depot contained around 18 million shells, the regional Investigative Committee said in a statement on Wednesday.