A key anti-Taliban tribal leader was assassinated Friday in a roadside bombing, the latest in a series of attacks against pro-government militias in the Afghan border area of northwestern Pakistan, officials said. Read More

Roman Catholic Church leaders in Dublin spent decades sheltering child-abusing priests from the law and most fellow clerics turned a blind eye, an investigation ordered by Ireland's government concluded Thursday. Read More

Indonesia has rejected a push by the resort island of Bali for rare turtles to be legally slain in Hindu ceremonies, siding with conservationists of the protected reptiles against religious advocates, an official said Friday. Read More

Namibia's longtime ruling party may see its grip on this desert nation weakened by a challenge from a new breakaway party hoping to attract voters dissatisfied with corruption and leadership scandals. Read More

Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on the Taliban and other extremist groups Friday to lay down their weapons and participate in rebuilding the battered country, as part of reconciliation efforts he has said will be his main objective during his second term. Read More

A politician whose wife and relatives were among 57 people massacred in the southern Philippines in an apparent bid to stop him from running for governor filed his candidacy Friday for the election. Read More

By day, French soldiers fight side by side with Afghans during Taliban attacks. By night, their officers share meals, the French trying to muster haute cuisine from military rations, the Afghans offering steaming piles of mutton stew and rice. Read More

China is set to launch its second lunar probe next October in preparation for an unmanned moon landing by the end of 2012, space program officials were quoted Friday as saying. Read More

Two foreign journalists freed after 15 months in captivity in Somalia have been receiving medical care in neighboring Kenya, Canada's ambassador said. Read More

The Khmer Rouge prison chief blamed for thousands of deaths at an infamous torture center asked Cambodia's genocide tribunal to release him Friday, citing the decade he already has served in jail and his cooperation with the panel. Read More

Drawing his .40-caliber pistol, Severiano Pontes dashes across the steaming, muddy jungle floor, a hunch telling him what he would find around a bend. Read More

As daylight faded and the winter cold set in, soldiers huddled inside a crude wooden hut to tuck into Thanksgiving turkeys the unit itself had fattened and to give thanks for having survived a year of combat in Afghanistan. Read More

Brazil's president said Thursday that "gringos" should pay Amazon nations to prevent deforestation, insisting rich Western nations have caused much more past environmental destruction than the loggers and farmers who cut and burn trees in the world's largest tropical rain forest. Read More

China promised to slow its carbon emissions, saying it would nearly halve the ratio of pollution to GDP over the next decade _ a major move by the world's largest emitter, whose cooperation is crucial to any deal as a global climate summit approaches. Read More

China has executed two men for abducting and selling 15 children, many of whom were taken as babies or toddlers and have not yet been reunited with their parents, state media said Friday. Read More

Brazilian diplomats denied Thursday that there is a crisis in relations with the U.S., while acknowledging differences with the government of President Barack Obama on issues such as Iran's nuclear ambitions and relations with post-coup Honduras. Read More

Canadian federal officials were well aware of allegations of abuse in Afghan jails as the Canadian military was handing over detainees to Afghanistan's intelligence service in 2006, Canada's former top official on Afghanistan said Thursday. Read More

Brazilians will be seeing a whole lot more of the student whose short pink dress got her booted from college: She's agreed to march in the nation's famously flesh-baring Carnival parades. Read More

Uruguay's likely next president tried to lead an armed revolution as a young man, hiding in sewers, killing a police officer and twice escaping prison through elaborately dug tunnels. Read More

The British government said Thursday it will not prevent the extradition of an autistic hacker accused of breaking into U.S. military computers. Read More