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GENEVA | Scientists switched on the world’s largest atom smasher Friday night for the first time since the $10 billion machine suffered a spectacular failure more than a year ago. It took a year of repairs before beams of protons circulated late Friday in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time since it was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault.
ISLAMABAD | Pakistan expressed fear Friday that a large increase in foreign troops in Afghanistan could push militants across the border into its territory and called on President Barack Obama to factor in that concern as part of his new war strategy. Meanwhile, a suspected U.S. missile strike killed eight militants in northwestern Pakistan, officials said, the second attack this week in an area believed to hold many insurgents. American officials generally do not acknowledge the unpopular attacks.
KABUL | President Hamid Karzai was inaugurated Thursday for a second term, pledging that Afghanistan will prosecute corrupt officials and control its own security within five years. As Karzai vowed to make the country safe from an increasingly violent Taliban insurgency, two U.S. service members died in a bomb attack and a suicide bomber killed 10 civilians in the south. But his speech appeared to make strides toward appeasing the international allies he needs to fend off the Islamist militants.
BAGHDAD | Warid Badr Salim’s front-page satire in a recent edition of the newspaper al-Mada compared Iraq’s parliament to wolves stalking sheep — the Iraqi people — and cheekily suggested that its members need the diplomatic passports they’ve awarded themselves just to leave Baghdad’s fortresslike Green Zone. In the midst of parliament’s debate over Iraq’s pivotal January elections, a lawmaker held up the article and denounced it. More than 150 lawmakers signed up to sue the paper.
BAGHDAD | Gunmen in Iraqi army uniforms abducted and killed 13 people whose bodies were found Monday with gunshot wounds to the head. The dead included a local leader of Iraq’s largest Sunni party, which once helped fight al-Qaida.
BEIJING | Seeking help with an array of global troubles, President Barack Obama said today that his closely watched talks with his Chinese counterpart are vital for their nations and for the world. Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao sent cooperative signals before they began closed-door meetings that were likely to touch on challenges ranging from nuclear proliferation, hurting economies, climate change and human rights.
SHANGHAI | President Barack Obama is walking a tightrope on his first trip to China, seeking to enlist help in tackling global problems while weighing when — or if — he should raise human rights concerns. Obama, who arrived in Shanghai late Sunday, held talks with local politicians today and conducted an American-style town hall discussion with Chinese university students.
SHANGHAI | Days before President Barack Obama’s Asia tour stopped in China, Tess Kirtz emerged from the new Barbie Shanghai worldwide flagship store with a gift for a child. “It was wild. It was big and pink. It’s beautiful in there,” said Kirtz, an Ohio mom who moved to Shanghai for her husband’s job.
CANBERRA, Australia | Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized today to thousands of impoverished British children shipped to Australia in past centuries with the promise of a better life, who then suffered abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home. At a ceremony in the Australian capital of Canberra attended by tearful former child migrants, Rudd apologized for his country’s role in the migration and extended condolences to the 7,000 survivors of the program who still live in Australia.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan | A pickup truck laden with explosives blew up in front of a police station in northwestern Pakistan today, killing at least three people in an area that has become the focal point for militant retaliation against a recent army offensive. Suspected militants have killed more than 300 civilians and security personnel in the last month in an attempt to weaken the country’s resolve to continue its military operation in the tribal area of South Waziristan, where al-Qaida and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding.
PRISTINA, Kosovo | Kosovo’s first independent elections have ended peacefully, with the prime minister claiming his party won convincingly. Some minority Serbs ignored a call to boycott and cast ballots alongside ethnic Albanians.
NEW DELHI | All elephants living in India’s zoos and circuses will be moved to wildlife parks and game sanctuaries where the animals can graze more freely, officials said. The decision affects about 140 elephants in 26 zoos and 16 circuses in the country, said B.K. Gupta, an officer at India’s Central Zoo Authority.
MILAN | In a decade-long journey, the Tunisian went from drug pusher on the streets of Milan, to Islamic militant trained in Afghanistan to kill Americans, to potential key witness against Guantanamo Bay detainees. Prosecutors said Lazhar Ben Mohamed Tlil may hold the key to prosecuting Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Italy and may be crucial to U.S. prosecutions, too.
For the birds LA MARQUE, Texas | Police say a low-flying pelican distracted a driver, causing him to veer off a road and drive his million-dollar sports car into a salt marsh.
SINGAPORE | A major pact within reach, President Barack Obama aims to nudge forward an arms control deal in talks with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. The 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum brought Obama to Singapore, but he is focusing on individual meetings today with Medvedev and with Indonesia’s Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of the world’s largest Muslim nation. The U.S.-Russia meeting takes place as the nations seek a successor to a Cold War era agreement.
SEOUL, South Korea | North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, known for shunning air travel, has six luxurious trains equipped with reception halls, conference rooms and high-tech communication facilities, a South Korean newspaper said. There are also 19 stations across North Korea exclusively for Kim’s trains, which have some 90 carriages, the mass circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper said, citing an analysis by South Korean and U.S. intelligence authorities.
TAIPEI, Taiwan | Revelations that Premier Wu Den-yih traveled abroad with a former gangster have stirred great interest among this island’s sensation-seeking media but left few of its 23 million people gaping in surprise. Taiwan’s six round-the-clock cable TV news stations and its mass circulation newspapers have given prominent play to Wu’s trip to the Indonesian resort of Bali last December with convicted murderer Chiang Chin-liang, a reputed extortionist and international gunrunner who was freed from prison in 2002 after serving 15 years.
TOKYO | President Barack Obama declared today that an era of American disengagement in the globe’s fastest-growing region was over. He also warned that the United States and its Asian partners “will not be cowed” by North Korea’s continued defiance over its nuclear weapons and other provocations.
WASHINGTON | President Barack Obama rejected the Afghanistan war options before him and asked for revisions, his defense secretary said Thursday, after the U.S. ambassador in Kabul argued that a significant U.S. troop increase would only prop up a weak, corruption-tainted government. Obama’s ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, who is also a former commander in Afghanistan, twice in the last week voiced strong dissent against sending large numbers of new forces, according to an administration official.
MOSCOW | President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday laid out his plan to move Russia’s economy into the modern age and overcome the grim industrial legacy of the Soviet Union. In his annual state-of-the-nation address, he took a few digs at Vladimir Putin, his predecessor and mentor, but made clear that the tightly controlled political system Putin created is here to stay.
A gunman went on a rampage on the Pacific resort island of Saipan on Friday, killing four people and wounding six others before fatally shooting himself, officials said.
A security guard has been wounded in an explosion outside the office of a non-governmental organization in the main city in northwestern Pakistan.
Police say a man with an automatic rifle opened fire on a car near a Paris train station, killing one man and wounding two others.
A suicide bomber killed 16 people and wounded at least 23 others Friday in a busy city square in western Afghanistan, while near Kabul a powerful former warlord narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, officials said.
A gunman went on a rampage on the Pacific resort island of Saipan on Friday, killing four people and wounding six others before fatally shooting himself, officials said.
A gas explosion tore through a coal mine in northern China on Saturday, killing 15 people and trapping another 114 nearly a third of a mile under ground, central government authorities said.
Underpaid, under-equipped and under-trained, Afghanistan's 93,000-member police force is the weak link in an ambitious security strategy to hand over defense of the country to Afghans so American and other foreign troops can go home.
Arun Kumar was born to disabled parents, beaten by his grandparents, ran away from home, got a job in a garment factory and had all his savings stolen by the police.
Egyptian soccer fans burned Algerian flags and rioted outside the Algerian Embassy in Cairo, smashing cars and shop windows, in an escalating row between the two countries over a bitter World Cup rivalry.
An American student accused of fatally stabbing her British roommate in Italy had a growing hatred for the victim and killed her in retaliation during a drug-fueled sex game, a prosecutor contended Friday in closing arguments at her murder trial.
Authorities in the western Mexican state of Michoacan are investigating the disappearance of a journalist who wrote about organized crime.
A Russian ship reached open water off Antarctica after struggling through a huge mass of sea ice for days, a Russian shipping company and a British travel agency said Friday.
Mexico's top domestic security official said Friday that sectors of the general public have cooperated with drug cartels in the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez, and the government is about to launch new social programs there to combat gangs.
EDITOR'S NOTE - The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child 20 years ago Friday, yet hundreds of millions of children still suffer from violence, hunger and disease. Associated Press correspondents around the globe interviewed children who illustrate the remaining challenges, along with some victories.
Conservationists say Congolese schoolchildren will soon be able to take a closer look at baby mountain gorillas.
Representatives of six world powers urged Iran on Friday to accept a U.N. plan aimed at delaying its ability to build a nuclear weapon, as the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency warned Tehran not to miss the opportunity to resolve the dispute.
Brazil's President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is joining his Palestinian counterpart in calling on Israel to stop building new settlements in areas claimed by Palestinians.
Catherine Ashton: International woman of mystery.
The World Health Organization said Friday it is investigating samples of variant swine flu linked to two deaths and one severe case in Norway, but that so far the significance of the mutation is unclear.
