The moderate National Forces Alliance of wartime prime minister Mahmoud Jibril scored a landslide victory over rival Islamist parties in Libya's first free national election in a generation, partial tallies showed on Thursday.

About 220 Syrians, mostly civilians, were killed in a village in the rebellious Hama region when it was bombarded by helicopter gunships and tanks then stormed by militiamen who slaughtered some families, opposition sources said on Friday.

Masked gunmen stormed a house and killed nine police cadets in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore on Thursday, police said, the second attack on security forces claimed by the Taliban in relatively peaceful Punjab province in four days.

Syria's ambassador to Iraq has defected and urged the army to "turn your guns on the criminals" of President Bashar al-Assad's government, giving the anti-Assad uprising one of its biggest boosts in 16 months of bloodshed.

The United States and China signaled a willingness on Thursday to work together on "sensitive issues" in a move to cool tensions between rival claimants to the potentially oil-rich and increasingly militarized South China Sea.

U.N. peace envoy Kofi Annan waded into big power politics on Tuesday, insisting regional heavyweight Iran should be involved in efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Syria crisis despite the West's firm rejection of a role for Tehran.

Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court said on Tuesday it had overruled President Mohamed Mursi's decision to recall the Islamist-led parliament that was dissolved by the country's generals last month.

President Barack Obama expanded his lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney to 6 percentage points in the White House race this month as voters became slightly more optimistic about the economy, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Tuesday.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Monday declared himself fully recovered from cancer and ready to return to the streets for his re-election campaign ahead of an October vote.

The Russian government accused local authorities on Monday of mishandling floods that killed 171 people near the Black Sea, hoping to deflect public anger over the high death toll and devastation from President Vladimir Putin.

U.N. peace envoy Kofi Annan said he and President Bashar al-Assad agreed on Monday on an approach to Syria's conflict that he would now take to the opposition, and flew on to Iran for talks with the main regional ally of Damascus.

Major donors pledged on Sunday to give Afghanistan $16 billion in development aid through 2015 as they try to prevent it from sliding back into chaos when foreign troops leave, but demanded reforms to fight widespread corruption.

President Vladimir Putin has ordered an investigation into accusations that officials could have done more to prevent floods killing at least 150 people in southern Russia, hoping to limit the criticism that has followed earlier disasters.

Kofi Annan is due to hold talks on Monday with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who said U.S. political support for "terrorists" was hindering the peace envoy's plan to end 16 months of bloodshed.

Sarko and Carla 'fled to Canada hours before raid on Paris home and knew police would come for them'

Syrian artillery pounded a northwestern town on Wednesday and areas near the ghost city of Douma, where residents recovered mutilated corpses after a rampage by militiamen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, activists said.

Japan's Fukushima nuclear crisis was a preventable disaster resulting from "collusion" among the government, regulators and the plant operator, an expert panel said on Thursday, wrapping up an inquiry into the worst nuclear accident in

Pakistan and the United States reached a deal on Tuesday to reopen land routes that NATO uses to supply troops in Afghanistan, ending a seven-month crisis that damaged ties between the two countries and complicated the U.S.-led Afghan war effort.

Buffeted by industry worries about high electricity costs on one side and public safety fears about nuclear power on the other, Japan's leaders are still struggling to craft a coherent energy policy more than a year after the Fukushima disaster.

After a month in which his re-election campaign picked up momentum, hard economic realities are about to hit President Barack Obama as he takes to the road on a campaign bus trip through the Rust Belt.

Japanese political heavyweight Ichiro Ozawa and 51 other lawmakers will quit the ruling party over a plan to increase the sales tax, an aide said on Monday, although the government will retain its majority in the powerful lower house of parliament.

The party that ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century claimed victory in a presidential election on Sunday as exit polls and early official results showed its candidate, Enrique Pena Nieto, with a clear advantage over his rivals.

Iran announced missile tests on Sunday and threatened to wipe Israel "off the face of the earth" if the Jewish state attacked it, brandishing some of its starkest threats on the day Europe began enforcing an oil embargo and harsh new sancti

China's Shenzhou 9 spacecraft returned to Earth on Friday, ending a mission that put the country's first woman in space and completed a manned docking test critical to its goal of building a space station by 2020.

Rebel forces attacked Syria's main court in central Damascus on Thursday, state television said, while Turkey deployed troops and anti-aircraft rocket launchers to the Syrian border, building pressure on President Bashar al-Assad.

Moscow expressed outrage on Wednesday over a U.S. Senate panel's approval of a bill that would penalize Russian officials for human rights abuses, and warned Washington that adoption of the sanctions would force Russia to respond in kind.

A new poll shows Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez only slightly ahead of challenger Henrique Capriles in the October 7 presidential election, welcome news for the opposition following numerous surveys showing Chavez with a wide lead.

Gunmen driving a van packed with gas canisters firebombed the Athens headquarters of Microsoft on Wednesday, underscoring the threat of instability as Greece asks for more time and less hardship in cutting its crippling debt.

Days of heavy rain in Bangladesh has set off flash floods and landslides which have killed more than 30 people and stranded about 150,000, police and officials said on Wednesday.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad declared on Tuesday that his country was at war and ordered his new government to spare no effort to achieve victory, as the worst fighting of the 16-month conflict reached the outskirts of the capital.