Pakistan: 11 arrested

QUETTA — Pakistan arrested 11 Iranians Monday near the countries' border amid tensions over a deadly suicide attack in Iran that Tehran alleges has links to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Authorities first said the 11 were members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, but then reversed course and identified them only as security officers. They were arrested after shooting out the tires of a car carrying smugglers, Pakistan authorities said.

The arrests could add to the strain between the two volatile nations triggered by the Oct. 18 attack on the Iranian side of the border. They came a day after the Pakistani president met Iran's interior minister and vowed to track down the perpetrators of the blast.

South Korea: Fraud

SEOUL — Hwang Woo-suk, a disgraced cloning expert from South Korea who had claimed major breakthroughs in stem-cell research, was convicted Monday of falsifying his papers and embezzling government research funds. A judge sentenced him to a suspended two-year prison term, saying Hwang had shown remorse and had not taken research money for personal use.

Hwang was once hailed as a national hero in the South. His school, Seoul National University, disowned him in 2005, saying that he had fabricated the papers he had published to global acclaim.

Hwang, a veterinarian by training, became known as an international pioneer in stem-cell research in 2004 when he and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Science claiming that they had created the world's first cloned human embryos and had extracted stem cells from them.

Tunisia: Elections

TUNIS — President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia was re-elected for a fifth term with 89 percent of the vote — his weakest performance yet, but more than enough to show his solid grip on the nation.

The results announced by the Interior Ministry on Monday from Sunday's voting reflect timid gestures toward Ben Ali's rivals in this year's race to lead this Mediterranean vacation haven.

The Obama administration expressed concern about how recent elections have been held in Tunisia.

"The government of Tunisia did not allow international election monitoring," said U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly. But he also said the U.S. is committed to working with the president of Tunisia and his government.

Venezuela: Espionage?