Elisha Maldonado

More than 100 people died and many more hospitalized in eastern India after consuming a batch of home-brewed liquor thought to have been laced with methanol, a highly toxic chemical, officials said Thursday. Police arrested eight suspected bootleggers.

After nearly nine years in Iraq, the war has formally drawn to a close as U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared an end to its mission in a ceremony in Baghdad on Thursday.

Two months after being acquitted of murder and released from her Italian prison, Amanda Knox has managed to find herself safe at home in Seattle and in the arms of a new boyfriend.

Anger with the selling of their land to real estate developers without their consent, compounded by the death of one of their appointed mediators, thousands of Chinese villagers in the southern China village of Wukan found themselves in a locked stand-off with authorities Wednesday.

The latest in a string of deadly crashes involving children, a school bus taking primary students home slipped off a country road into an irrigation ditch in eastern China, killing 15 children and wounding eight others, officials said.

Iran denied a U.S. request to return a surveillance drone captured by Iranian forces while on a CIA spying mission, saying the country should first apologize for violating Islamic Republic airspace.

As U.S. troops prepare for departure from Iraq, President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met at the White House Monday for talks focusing on the future relationship between the two countries.

Sufficiently enraging Palestinian officials, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich maintained his assertion that Palestinians are an invented people with no definitive right to their own state.

After calling for elections to be held in Zimbabwe next year, the country's long-time ruler, President Robert Mugabe, expressed confidence Thursday that his party can win because voters support his party's progressive economic ideas.

Pope Benedict XVI will visit Communist Cuba this spring, a senior Roman Catholic Church official said Thursday.

A letter bomb addressed to Deutsche Bank chief Josef Ackermann contained a fully functional bomb, and capable of exploding had it not been intercepted in the bank's mailroom, was the work of far-left Italian group, German authorities said Thursday; and more explosives may still be in the post.

Radio news host Luz Marina Paz was fatally shot by motorcycle-riding gunmen on Tuesday as she commuted to work in the capital of Honduras.

Admitting defeat, one of two remaining leaders of the Shining Path guerrilla group in Peru has said his troops will cease attacks and are seeking a negotiation for peace that will end its war with the government.

Libya's interim government has issued an ultimatum to regional militias lingering in the capital of Tripoli: disarm or leave.

Twin blasts in Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif aimed at Afghanistan's minority Shiite Muslims killed nearly 60 people on Tuesday as they celebrated Ashura, one of their sect's holiest days, signaling, perhaps, a new sectarian turn in what was one of the war's deadliest attacks.

Partly owing to the huge sex scandal commenced by former French presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York earlier this year, French Parliament will debate a bill to ban prostitution in France on Tuesday. If passed, it could become law next year.

Breaking into a French nuclear power plant before dawn Monday, Greenpeace activists say they have exposed the vulnerability of the site as they unfurled a banner on one of its domes reading: Safe Nuclear Power Doesn't Exist.

Pol Pot's right-hand man, Nuon Chea, the No. 2 leader of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, under whom an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians were killed in the 1970s, on Monday told a court his regime were not bad people, denying responsibility for the deaths, instead placing the blame on Vietnam.

Syria has responded positively to an Arab League request that it allow observers into the country as part of a peace plan to end an eight-month-long uprising, but on the condition that the League drop sanctions and agree to amendments that league officials have previously rejected, the Foreign Ministry said Monday.

A British solider has been jailed for stabbing a 10-year-old boy after getting drunk on vodka while serving in Afghanistan.

Thousands of Tunisian Islamists and secularists warred outside the interim parliament on Saturday, rallying against extremism as lawmakers draft a new constitution for Tunisia.

The United Nations High Commissioner for human rights on Friday urged the UN Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands following a reveal of evidence by an independent panel that suggests the country's security forces have committed crimes against humanity as it attempts to clamp down on an eight-month-old uprising.

A Tibetan monk has been hospitalized after he set himself on fire Thursday in the Chinese-ruled Tibetan autonomous region, the 12th self-immolation in an apparent protest against Chinese rule, a human rights group said.

Two men found guilty of setting off a bomb in a Minsk subway station in April, killing 15 people and wounding hundreds, were handed down a death sentence in a Belarus court Wednesday.

In a rare peaceful transition of presidential power, Kyrgyzstan inaugurated a new president Thursday, marking the first time the former Soviet Central Asian nation chose a successor through votes at the ballot box, not the streets.

Arriving in Myanmar on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton became the first United States Secretary of State in more than 50 years to visit the country, also known as Burma.

Following the example set by the Arab League and the U.S., Turkey on Wednesday slapped a series of economic and financial sanctions on Syria over the government's continued bloody crackdown on an eight-month uprising.

Malaysian Bar Council President Lim Chee Wee said the ban on street demonstrations was outrageous.

Following the wave of pro-democracy demonstrations across the Middle East that have led to free and fair elections, Morocco's King Mohammed VI appointed the leader of an Islamist party to be the country's new head of government Tuesday.