Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the mission was now to expand on security gains, even as U.S. troop levels decreased.

• Car bombs kill at least 12 in Baghdad, police say
• Sunni proponent of reconciliation is killed

UN efforts to investigate allegations that Iran tried to make nuclear arms have run into a dead end, with Tehran steadfastly blocking efforts to probe the accusations, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday.

A "peace climb" on Mount Kenya brings together people from the rival ethnic groups that slaughtered one another this year after the disputed election.

President George W. Bush on Monday lavished the full White House treatment on Ghanian President John Kufuor, a West African ally who holds a kinship with the U.S. president as their two-term tenures near a close.

Suspected al-Qaida militants killed 12 Mauritanian soldiers Monday, two senior officials said. The attack, which came after the terror group promised to avenge the country's recent coup, was the worst suffered by the military in three years.

A high court judge Friday set aside corruption charges against Jacob Zuma, at least temporarily clearing his way to become the next president of South Africa.

Accusations that a soccer player was using witchcraft during a local match in eastern Congo sparked a riot that killed 13 people, a U.N.-funded radio station reported Monday.

A quiet revolution is stirring in Jenin, once a byword for the extremes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

The World Bank is out of a pipeline project in Chad it started in 2000, and whose purpose had been to persuade the country to dedicate its oil earnings to fighting poverty.

The tranquillity that prevailed as millions of Angolans went to the polls last week and the acceptance of the outcome by the opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, set this election apart from Angola's calamitous last vote, in 1992.