North Korea celebrated its 62nd anniversary Thursday with odes to supreme leader Kim Jong Il, amid uncertainty over whether a rare political meeting believed aimed at promoting his son as successor had begun.

Hooded gunmen killed the mayor of a small town in the northern Mexico state of San Luis Potosi on Wednesday, and prosecutors announced the arrest of seven suspects in the massacre of 72 migrants in August.

One of East Timor's deputy prime ministers said he has resigned after Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao publicly called him a "liar" for his outspoken critiques of the government's failure to tackle corruption and improve people's lives.

South Korea said it will ban many financial dealings with Iran and impose other penalties as part of a U.S.-led campaign to enforce sanctions against the country over its disputed nuclear enrichment program.

Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

European Union nations and the continent's biggest human rights organization slammed Iran on Wednesday for its plan to stone a woman convicted of adultery, while Iran's ambassador to the Vatican said there is "hope" the punishment could be eased upon review by Iranian authorities.

A Muslim stonemason who spent nearly four decades helping to restore a Roman Catholic cathedral in France has been immortalized as a winged gargoyle peering out from its facade -- with the inscription "God is great" written in French and Arabic.

President Alan Garcia says he doesn't consider Lori Berenson a threat to Peru, suggesting he may be inclined to commute the New Yorker's accomplice-to-terrorism sentence so she can go home.

Australia and New Zealand shared first place, and the United States tied for fifth, in a first-of-its kind survey ranking 153 nations on the willingness of their citizens to donate time and money to charity.

The Taliban's shadowy leader told Afghans on Wednesday that the insurgents are winning the war and warned Americans that they are wasting lives and billions in tax dollars by continuing in the conflict.

Ten people have been arrested in raids across Europe against computer pirates who put illegal copies of movies and television series on the Internet, Belgian police said Wednesday.

Ireland plans to split its most troubled financial institution, Anglo Irish Bank, in two as part of wider efforts to reassure international lenders that the Irish are taking control of their debt crisis.

The hidden face of the Emirates' economic crunch is in places such as Industrial Zone 18 and the ramshackle compound for about 700 migrant workers within. For more than six months, they have lived on charity, fought off rats and slept amid piles of trash after a construction company abruptly closed and left them jobless.

A Romanian Gypsy leader on Wednesday compared French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Romania's pro-Nazi wartime leader, following the expulsion of hundreds of Gypsies from France.

Fidel Castro's warnings of a looming war between the United States and Iran have Cuba buzzing with fears of nuclear Armageddon. But the revolutionary icon's alarming predictions have barely registered in the place where it might matter most: Iran.

Three suspected U.S. missile strikes in less than 12 hours hit militant targets in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, officials said, an unusually intense barrage that follows four other such attacks in the last week. At least 14 suspected militants were killed.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed Wednesday to press ahead with his contested overhaul of the country's pension system and unions promptly announced new national strikes and protests, a day after bringing more than 1 million people to the streets.

Jeffrey Allen Weathers moved from Alaska to an oceanfront apartment in the Caribbean, but his new neighbors soon suspected the heavyset American hadn't come for the sun. The FBI now says they were right.

Gunmen on Wednesday killed an Iraqi TV journalist, the second to be slain in Iraq in as many days, highlighting the dangers media workers continue to face in the country seven years after the U.S.-led invasion.