BAGHDAD – Three car bombs tore through Baghdad and the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah on Sunday, killing at least 36 people and breaking what had been a period of relative calm since the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

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.

PARIS – Masked youths clashed with police and set fires in cities across France on Tuesday as protests against a proposed hike in the retirement age took an increasingly radical turn. Hundreds of flights were canceled, long lines formed at gas stations and train service in many regions was cut in half.

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 – A mad rush to the playground turned into a stampede that left dozens of elementary school children hurt and seven severely injured in western China on Monday, state media and 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.

SWIEBODZIN, Poland – A gigantic statue of Jesus that Poles claim is the world's largest rose majestically above a small town on Saturday, as the grandiose dream of a local priest finally came to pass.

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.

THESSALONIKI, Greece – Thousands of Greeks took to the streets Saturday in union-led protests against the debt-plagued country's harsh austerity program, before a keynote speech on the economy by the prime minister

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.

While American women celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Pill this month, women in India are embracing a different method of contraception. By the end of the day, more than 100 million will have taken a birth control pill, but its acceptance in the world's second most populous nation has been dismally low. According to the 2005-2006 National Family Health Survey, ...

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 ...

CAIRO – Egypt will shoulder the costs of restoring the country's Jewish houses of worship said the culture minister Tuesday, two days after a historic synagogue in Cairo's ancient Jewish quarter was rededicated in a private ceremony. Farouk Hosny said in a statement that his ministry views Jewish sites as much a part of Egypt's culture as Muslim mosques or Coptic ...

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.

ROME – U.N. food agencies said Wednesday that 166 million people in 22 countries suffer chronic hunger or difficulty finding enough to eat as a result of what they called protracted food crises.

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 ...

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.