World News

Local governments in southwest China’s quake-ravaged Sichuan Province have begun a coordinated campaign to buy the silence of angry parents whose children died during the earthquake, according to interviews with more than a dozen parents from four collapsed schools. Officials threaten that the parents will get nothing if they refuse to sign, the parents say.

Radioactive particles spewed from a pipe at a French nuclear reactor on Wednesday, slightly contaminating 100 employees, a spokeswoman for the national electric company said.

The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs — and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.

Although her birth opened the door for millions of infertile couples worldwide to give birth to IVF or test tube babies, Brown has no big plans to celebrate the landmark date.

Al-Qaida's foreign fighters who have for years bedeviled Iraq are increasingly going to Afghanistan to fight instead, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States said Wednesday.

Sudan's president made a defiant visit to Darfur just a week after being charged with genocide in the war-ravaged region, vowing not to be intimidated by the indictment and then breaking into a tribal dance on a parched field to the delight of cheering supporters.

A high-yielding variety of peanut bred by an international research center in India is now being tried in Bicol.

The variety — ICFV 86564 — had earlier been tried and found to thrive in Cagayan Valley.

Introduced in the Philippines in 2005, the variety was bred by the India-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), currently headed by former Agriculture Secretary William D. Dar.

Russia may start regular flights by long-range bombers to Cuba in response to US plans to build missile defence sites in Eastern Europe, the newspaper Izvestia reported Monday, quoting an official.

Cambodia is seeking regional intervention in its territorial dispute with Thailand after talks between the two neighbors failed to end a military standoff around an ancient cliff-side temple, officials said Tuesday.

A suicide bomber killed three civilians and wounded one more in an attack in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Tuesday, a police official said.

A doctor from the Nepali Congress has been elected the first president of Nepal.

The Constituent Assembly declared Ram Braan Yadav won 308 votes in the second round of presidential elections to become president of the world's youngest federal democratic republic. His major competitor Ram Raja Prasad Singh from the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) won 282 votes.

The Amana funds, invested according to Sharia, have more than doubled since 2003, to $1.3 billion.

Global food shortages have placed the Middle East and North Africa in a quandary, as they are forced to choose between growing more crops to feed an expanding population or preserving their already scant supply of water.

Gordon Brown threatened Iran with tougher sanctions as he became the first British prime minister to address the Israeli parliament.

A U.S. Embassy official said Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama arrived in Iraq on Monday where he will meet with commanders and troops in a war he has long opposed.

A Tropical Storm warning is in effect for the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico from the border with Belize to Campeche Mexico.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says U.S. troops should leave Iraq "as soon as possible," according to a magazine report, and he called presidential candidate Barack Obama's suggestion of 16 months "the right timeframe for a withdrawal."

A Shiite militia that claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of five Britons in Iraq more than a year ago said one of its hostages committed suicide, a British newspaper reported.

The Sunday Times of London published what it said was a statement in a video it obtained from the group through an intermediary in Iraq.

The founder of the Unification Church, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, is recovering from injuries he suffered when a helicopter taking him to a church-linked hospital crashed into a mountain in poor visibility, officials said.

An Afghan journalist who contributes to The Associated Press has been freed after his pictures and video footage of two women executed by the Taliban led intelligence officials to hold him for questioning for two days.