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DANANG, Vietnam | On the day his side lost the Vietnam War, Hung Ba Le fled his homeland at the age of 5 in a fishing trawler crammed with 400 refugees. Thirty-four years later, he made an unlikely homecoming — as the commander of a U.S. Navy destroyer.
BERLIN | Massive colorful dominoes painted by German students were placed Saturday along the former path of the Berlin Wall to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the barrier that divided the city for nearly three decades. Many of the 7.5-foot-high plastic foam dominoes carried messages, including “We are one people.” The 1,000 or so dominoes stretching for a mile will be toppled Monday as part of celebrations of the wall’s fall.
Why Meadow can lark ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. | Meadow the yearling Black Angus calf spends her days frolicking in northeastern New Mexico’s cattle country with her prosthetic hind legs.
Peru’s Nazca people — famous for their huge line drawings on a desert plateau that are fully visible only from the air — set the stage for their collapse around 500 A.D. by deforesting the plain, allowing a flood free rein through the Rio Ica valley, researchers have found. “They died out because they destroyed their natural ecosystem,” said archaeologist Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima, Peru, co-author of a paper in the current issue of Latin American Antiquity. “As the population expanded, they put in too many fields and didn’t protect the landscape. The El Nino wiped away society.”
BANGKOK | Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s former prime minister, has spent much of the past three years roaming the globe, shopping for diamonds in Africa, golfing at Asian resorts — and humiliating the government from a distance. Now the fugitive ex-leader is an economic adviser to the government of neighboring Cambodia, and that is too close for comfort for Thailand’s current leadership.
GEORGETOWN, Guyana | Recent arsons and shootings are the work of someone living in the United States, President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana said. Jagdeo made the allegation late Friday, shortly after his administration requested the U.S. Embassy for assistance with the investigation.
BEIJING | A Chinese scholar persecuted during the Cultural Revolution for smuggling a rare collection of mushrooms out of China before World War II was honored Saturday when the collection was returned more than 70 years later. At a ceremony at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cornell University President David Skorton handed over the collection that had been meticulously gathered by scholar Shu Chun Teng.
SAN‘A, Yemen | Saudi warplanes and artillery bombarded a Shiite rebel stronghold in northern Yemen on Saturday for a third straight day, according to the rebel fighters, and Yemen’s president vowed to wipe out the insurrection. The sporadic five-year conflict between Yemen’s weak central government and rebels in the north of the impoverished country escalated last week when military forces from neighboring Saudi Arabia began shelling and bombing rebel positions.
KABUL | Two American soldiers disappeared in western Afghanistan after a routine resupply mission, and more than 25 NATO and Afghan security forces members were wounded during the search mission for them, the alliance said Friday. Officials indicated it was unlikely the two missing had been taken captive.
SAN‘A, Yemen | Saudi Arabia sent fighter jets and artillery bombardments Thursday across the border into northern Yemen in a military incursion apparently aimed at helping its troubled southern neighbor control an escalating Shiite rebellion, Arab diplomats and the rebels said. The Saudis — owners of a sophisticated air force they rarely use — have been increasingly worried that extremism and instability in Yemen could spill over to their country, the world’s largest oil exporter.
MEXICO CITY | Three doctors and a nurse have been arrested for allegedly selling newborns after telling mothers their babies had died at a private hospital in Mexico City, authorities said Wednesday. Police uncovered the scheme after one of the women learned her baby was alive and had been sold to another woman for 15,000 pesos ($1,130), said Luis Genaro, the capital’s deputy attorney general.
LONDON | A man will go to jail for 18 months for embezzling more than $800,000 from the official composer to Queen Elizabeth II. Michael Arnold, 76, was the agent and manager of musician Peter Maxwell Davies for more than 30 years.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina | Trial began Monday for Argentina’s last dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, five former generals and two others accused of kidnappings and murders in one of the nation’s largest torture centers, the Campo de Mayo military base. Bignone is accused of holding ultimate responsibility for cases of torture, illegal break-ins and deprivations of freedoms from 1976 to 1978, before he was appointed president by the military junta in the waning years of the dictatorship.
SANTIAGO, Chile | Hundreds of former military draftees rallying outside Chile’s presidential palace were asked Sunday to come forward to reveal crimes they committed and witnessed during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The draftees have long feared that if they name names and reveal where bodies are buried, they will face prosecution or retaliation by those who ordered them to torture and kill.
KABUL | President Hamid Karzai’s leadership is weak and his government corrupt, and nearly a third of the votes he won in the August election were thrown out as fakes. But in the end, the Obama administration is sticking by Afghanistan’s president — because it has few other options.
KABUL | President Hamid Karzai’s challenger plans to call for a boycott of next weekend’s runoff election in an attempt to force the vote’s postponement until spring, his campaign manager said — a move that would dim U.S. hopes for a stable Afghan government for months. Karzai rejected Abdullah Abdullah’s conditions for Saturday’s vote, including removing top election officials whom the challenger accused of involvement in cheating in the first-round balloting in August.
WASHINGTON | It is a worrisome first: an American accused of going to Europe to plot a terrorist attack there. Recent arrests in Chicago underscore a growing concern among Western officials about the threat posed by U.S. extremists who take advantage of their passports to travel easily around the world on violent missions.
KINGSTON, Jamaica | Coming to a store near you: Bob Marley video games, shoes … snowboards? Heirs of the Jamaican reggae legend are plunging into the global trademark wars, seeking to enforce their exclusive rights to an image that has grown steadily in scope and appeal since the Jamaican superstar died of brain cancer in 1981 at age 36.
BAGHDAD | A man being questioned in connection with last week’s deadly double bombings in the Iraqi capital was able to seize a gun and kill an investigative officer before being shot himself, the government said Saturday. The man, who was not identified, snatched a gun from a guard and wounded the guard, then killed the investigative officer during the interrogation in the officer’s Interior Ministry office, the ministry said in a Web site statement.
KORSOER, Denmark | The world’s largest cruise ship has cleared a crucial obstacle, lowering its smokestacks to squeeze under a bridge in Denmark. The Oasis of the Seas — which rises about 20 stories high — passed below the Great Belt Fixed Link with a slim margin as it left the Baltic Sea on Saturday on its maiden voyage to Florida.
A suicide bomber blew himself up Sunday in a market in northwest Pakistan crowded with shoppers ahead of a Muslim holiday, killing 12 people, including a mayor who once supported but had turned against the Taliban, officials said.
Britain's Defense Ministry says a British soldier has been killed in southern Afghanistan.
Key dates in the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe in 1989:
Harald Jaeger was a loyal East German border guard - respected and trusted to command a crossing point to the west on Berlin's Bornholmer Strasse.
Days after coming to power in September, Japan's new prime minister broached forming a new East Asian trading bloc with rival China - one that would exclude the United States.
Italy on Sunday hailed the capture of a wig-disguised mobster who had been on the list of the country's top 30 fugitives.
Turkey said Sunday that Sudan's internationally indicted leader, President Omar al-Bashir, will not attend a conference of Muslim nations in Istanbul.
Iraq's parliament ended weeks of debate Sunday and passed a long-delayed law paving the way for the planned January election to go forward, sidestepping a crisis that could have delayed the U.S. troop withdrawal.
A Brazilian university has expelled a woman who was heckled by hundreds of fellow students for wearing a short, pink dress to class - publicly accusing her Sunday of immorality.
Honduran police say gunmen ambushed a convoy carrying the country's top prosecutor, but neither he nor his bodyguards were harmed.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Europeans and Americans on Sunday to see the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a call to action against new global threats.
Nothing like a little time apart to rekindle the affections that could lead to a baby panda.
China's premier on Sunday pledged $10 billion in new low interest loans to African nations over three years, offering the beleaguered continent sorely needed cash while dismissing criticism that Beijing's motives in Africa are far from altruistic.
U.S. Homeland Security officials are working with groups around United States to head off any possible anti-Muslim backlash following the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, the agency's chief said Sunday.
Pope Benedict XVI made a one-day pilgrimage Sunday to northern Italy to pay tribute to Paul VI, his predecessor who made him a cardinal.
A day-by-day look at President Barack Obama's trip to Asia:
Switzerland has opened its own investigation into the case of a nuclear physicist France suspected of al-Qaida links, an official said Sunday.
As Pakistan's army plows ahead with its offensive in South Waziristan, its success is at risk because the government has yet to come up with a plan to run and rebuild the lawless territory so that the Taliban and al-Qaida don't re-emerge.
After notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed, the son who many thought would succeed him fled Colombia, assumed a new identity and lived a low-profile life as an architect in Argentina.
The city of romance got a lesson in love's hard knocks Sunday, as thousands flocked to the French capital's first divorce fair.
