Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, killing all on board. The flight, heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was carrying 283 passengers, mostly Dutch, and 15 crew members. The debris field had a radius of 1.2 miles, indicating that the plane broke up or exploded in the air.

The plane went down in the rebel-held province of Luhansk, and the Ukrainian government has accused the Russian-backed rebels of attacking the plane with an SA-11, or Buk,...

In Taiwan’s Penghu archipelago, 48 people were killed and 10 were injured on July 23 when a TransAsia Airways plane carrying 58 people crashed into a building in Xixi village as it tried to land at Magong Airport. The flight, ATR-72, was inbound from Kaohsiung, Taiwan. 

At the time of the crash, Typhoon Matmo was ongoing over Taiwan, and weather conditions were poor but considered safe. Nine other flights had safely completed the route in the hours before the crash.

Five people...

Tens of thousands of new cases of chikungunya fever were reported in the Dominican Republic and Haiti in late June and early July.

The virus, which causes fever, joint pain and skin rash, is spread by mosquitoes. Symptoms usually last for a few days but sometimes can persist for weeks. Though the disease is rarely fatal, 21 deaths in the Caribbean have been attributed to it.

There have been more than 265,000 confirmed cases of the disease in the Caribbean since the outbreak...