World

The husband of an acclaimed dissident Cuban blogger was punched and shouted down by a pro-government mob Friday after he challenged the presumed state agents who earlier roughed up his wife to a street corner debate.

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.

Valuing truth over the right to privacy, Argentina's Congress has authorized the forced extraction of DNA from people who may have been born to political prisoners slain a quarter-century ago - even when they don't want to know their birth parents.

U.S. Sen. John McCain predicted success in the Afghan war effort Friday if President Barack Obama makes a decision quickly to send the reinforcements requested by his top commander there.

Authorities in the western Mexican state of Michoacan are investigating the disappearance of a journalist who wrote about organized crime.

The walls that the rockets blew out have not been repaired, and the plaster is a dense scattershot of bullet holes. Dozens of holes, blasted by grenades, pockmark the linoleum floors.

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.

A British couple being held hostage by Somali pirates said in an interview broadcast Friday that they fear they will be killed or handed to a terrorist group if a ransom is not paid soon.

A retired British couple snatched from their yacht by Somali pirates said in an interview broadcast Friday they fear they could be killed within a week or handed to a terrorist group if a ransom demand is not paid.

A lesbian who deserted the U.S. military and fled to Canada must be given another chance to plead her case for refugee status, Canada's Federal Court ruled Friday.

Guatemalan officials on Friday announced the resumption of international adoptions after a nearly two-year suspension prompted by the discovery that some babies were being sold.

Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display, an Italian museum director said Friday.

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.

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.

The United States will do its part to reduce corruption in Afghanistan by examining its own contracts and projects, even as it is demanding the same from the Afghan government, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.