Yemen

An airliner belonging to Yemeni state carrier Yemenia that was carrying 153 people crashed into choppy seas as it came in to land on the Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros today, officials said. "Not yet," an airline official told Reuters when asked whether the carrier had information about survivors, adding that the 142 passengers included nationals of France and the Comoros.

It was sometime after 2 a.m. when gunfire and mortars startled Oqaba Mohammed out of sleep. She thanked God she was alive and quickly gathered her four children, walking into the night and away from the only home she had ever known. "We had nothing but the clothes on our bodies, but I didn't look back," said Mohammed, who had carried her physically disabled daughter in one arm and her 15-month-old son in the other. "We walked for three days, from village to village, asking for food from ordinary people.

Aisha Sufi, a woman with tired eyes and nine children, waits for a water truck in a nation of drought. She is one of an estimated 150,000 Yemenis who have left their villages this year bound for Sana, Yemen's capital, in search of basic needs. Water and jobs, for example, are increasingly scarce in rural regions where many populations have quadrupled since the 1980s. "It's not good here or there, but it's better to be here," said Sufi, who lives in the Hoshaishiya neighborhood of Sana.