A severe sandstorm blanketed Saudi Arabia's capital of Riyadh for three hours on Tuesday halting flights to and from the city and causing 70 road accidents.

The wall of dust also forced Kuwait to suspend exports of oil at its three ports until the storm subsided.

Air New Zealand (ANZ) on Tuesday became the first airline to successfully fly a commercial plane powered by a 50-50 blend of jet fuel and vegetable oil from the jathropa plant.

ANZ's Boeing 747-400 plane completed a two-hour test flight over Auckland's Hauraki Gulf with one of its engine powered by jet A1 fuel and the other engine burning inedible lipid oil extracted from jathropa seeds.

An Indian lawyer has asked the Mumbai High Court to totally ban Google Earth claiming that terrorists who attacked the financial center last month used maps freely available from the satellite imaging website.

In his petition filed on Monday, Amit Karkhanis also sought a complete ban on similar sites, including the online map website Wikimapia, in the interest of national security.

Wellesley College's Davis Museum officials say they aren't sure what happened to a missing painting likely worth millions by French Cubist artist Fernand Leger.

However, it is possible that the missing 1921 painting "Woman and Child," which hasn't been seen since 2007, was mistakenly thrown away.

Alberta's enrollment rate is increasing as more migrants move to the province to find jobs in its booming oil industry, however, it suffers from a high dropout rate among secondary students.

According to a Statistics Canada report released Monday, only 68 percent of the young Albertans in school year 2005-06 remained long enough to finish high school. The others were enticed to look for jobs in the oil industry, according to Patric Blouin, author of Summary Public School Indicator's for the Provinces and Territories.