The grand gathering of North Korea's party faithful that was supposed to have been held earlier this month in Pyongyang - and then, mysteriously, wasn't - finally got under way on Tuesday. Whether it was like a Broadway show that had to work out its kinks in the North Korean equivalent of New Haven before heading to the (not so) bright ...

AMSTERDAM – Dutch police on Sunday arrested a British man of Somali ancestry at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport for possible links to a terrorist group, a spokesman for the Dutch prosecutors said.

BEIJING – An American-born panda gave birth to her eighth cub in southwest China, a rare accomplishment for the endangered species known for being poor breeders

GROZNY, Russia – Islamic insurgents including a suicide bomber stormed Chechnya's Parliament on Tuesday, leaving six people dead and 17 injured in one of the most brazen attacks on the provincial capital in months, officials said.

BEIJING – China knows less about and has less influence over its close ally North Korea than is usually presumed and is likely to eventually accept a reunified peninsula under South Korean rule, according to U.S. diplomatic files leaked to the WikiLeaks website.

ALGIERS (Reuters) – Libya has ordered a diplomat at the United States embassy in Tripoli to leave the country within 24 hours for breaching diplomatic rules, two Libyan newspapers reported on Sunday.

BEIJING - China said Wednesday that it would build a clinic in each of its nearly 700,000 villages within three years, part of a sweeping 850 billion yuan ($124 billion) investment in health care reform. The clinic program is part of an even more ambitious plan to provide basic medical coverage and insurance to all of China's 1.3 billion people. Public ...

JOHANNESBURG – A California church wants to get back to helping AIDS orphans in Africa, once it resolves questions over licensing that led to the arrests of six of its workers in impoverished Zimbabwe, a minister said Sunday.

All nurses will need to be educated to degree level from 2013, the Government announced today. At present, nurses receive a diploma after two or three years of training but they will now have to complete three or four years to obtain a degree. The move is as a result of changes to the way nurses work, including handling more advanced ...

LONDON – For more than a quarter of a century, Linda De Croock lived with constant pain from a car accident that smashed her windpipe. Today, she has a new one after surgeons implanted the windpipe from a dead man into her arm, where it grew new tissue before being transplanted into her throat. The way doctors trained her body to ...

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — South Africa will treat all HIV-positive babies and expand testing, the president announced Tuesday, a dramatic and eagerly awaited shift in a country that has more people living with HIV than any other. President Jacob Zuma's speech on World AIDS Day was viewed as a definitive turning point for a nation where the previous administration distrusted ...

PARIS – Mideast rivals Israel and Syria on Tuesday each announced ambitions to develop nuclear energy, with Israel facing the prospect that its plan could bring new international attention to its secretive nuclear activities.

CARACAS, Venezuela – A plane carrying 51 people crashed Monday in eastern Venezuela, and officials said at least 21 people survived. The French-built ATR-42 from the state airline Conviasa crashed about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz at about 10 a.m. (1430 GMT), Transportation Minister Francisco Garces told state television. He said the plane went down ...

NICOSIA, Cyprus – Three months after it was stolen, the corpse of Cyprus' former president was found reburied in another grave and the country's justice minister said Tuesday that it had been held for ransom. But two spokesmen for former President Tassos Papadopoulos' family insisted his relatives had never received a demand for money.

CONCEPCION, Chile (AFP) – Divers searched for bodies in debris-clogged waters off Chile's central coast Thursday as bulldozers began removing tonnes of rubble five days after a massive earthquake and tsunami. Rescue dogs were also combing the fetid coastline, where emergency personnel believe monster waves swept hundreds to their deaths. The official death toll stands at 802, but that was expected ...

JERUSALEM – The killing of a Hamas operative in a Dubai hotel may signal the end of an era: the moment when modern technology finally caught up with the cloak-and-dagger world of disguised assassins and fake passports. "The last assassination of its kind," said a headline in the Israeli daily Haaretz.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan – In a rundown market here along the road to Afghanistan, you can buy U.S. Army gear stamped with soldiers' names, booklets marked "for official use only," even a manual that illustrates how "jammers" can stop remote-controlled bombs.

BEIJING – China spent tens of billions of dollars on a dazzling 2008 Olympics. It has sent astronauts into space. It recently became the world's second largest economy. Yet it gets more than $2.5 billion a year in foreign government aid — and taxpayers and lawmakers in donor countries are increasingly asking why.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Workers are carving out mass graves on a hillside north of Haiti's capital, using earth-movers to bury 10,000 people in a single day even as relief workers warn that Haitians are still dying of injuries from the Jan. 12 quake for lack of medical care. Clinics have 12-day waiting lists for patients, untreated injuries are festering and ...