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China says it is opening up a disputed island chain with just one hotel to tourism in another step in its battle to demonstrate that the potentially oil-rich territory is Chinese.

Five Americans were killed when a bomb targeted a convoy in southern Afghanistan on Saturday in the deadliest single combat incident for U.S. citizens this year.

California Gov. Jerry Brown has designs on building some of the most expensive public works projects in the nation and wants to keep the state moving forward in its slow recovery from the recession.

A former director of the Dominican Republic's National Drug Control Agency has been extradited to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges.

Brazil's federal prosecutor's office has asked police to investigate allegations that former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was involved in the massive cash-for-votes scheme in Congress that led to the conviction of several of his closest aides.

A Mali government spokesman says clashes between national soldiers and armed police have killed one soldier and injured a policeman.

Authorities in northeast Nigeria say at least 11 people were killed in a gun and machete attack carried out by radical Islamic extremists in a northeast Nigeria village.

Two days before her comrades embarked on an uprising that came to symbolize Jewish resistance against the Nazis in World War II, 14-year-old Aliza Mendel got her orders: Escape from the Warsaw Ghetto.

A man has strapped himself to large balloons filled with helium and floated from the island where Nelson Mandela was kept prisoner to the shores of the South African mainland.

Chilean port workers are returning to work after reaching a deal to end three weeks of strikes that blocked exports of copper, fruit and wood pulp.

The body of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda is being exhumed this weekend in an effort to clear up four decades of suspicion about how he died in the days after Chile's military coup.

The Italian government has approved a decree to pay 40 billion euros ($52 billion) owed by government entities to private businesses over the next 12 months to help relaunch Italy's stagnant economy.

Venezuela's animated campaign ahead of its April 14 presidential election has seen its share of shake-your-head remarks by both candidates: Interim President Nicolas Maduro of the ruling party, and opposition candidate Henrique Capriles. Here's a sampling:

The Obama administration is exploring whether a long-abandoned initiative proposed by Saudi Arabia 11 years ago could become the basis for a regional peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials.

The influential Serbian Orthodox Church appealed Saturday against a deal with Kosovo Albanians that would pave the way for Serbia's European Union membership.

Central African Republic's self-appointed leader on Saturday announced the creation of a new council that will choose an interim president, a move aimed at placating the international community after he seized power by force two weeks ago.

Hundreds of supporters of an Iranian opposition group have rallied in Stockholm, denouncing the Islamic Republic's regime and urging the U.N. to better protect the group's members in neighboring Iraq.

Former President Nelson Mandela was discharged from a hospital on Saturday following treatment for pneumonia, the presidency said in news that cheered South Africans who had waited tensely for health updates on a beloved national figure.

The Italian Foreign Ministry says that four Italian journalists have been detained in Syria.

A member of an Iraq Shiite militant group was killed in Syria, an official with the group said Saturday, highlighting how the increasingly sectarian conflict there is drawing in its fragile neighbors that already experience unrest among religious sects.

Clashes between Egyptian Muslims and Christians erupted early Saturday in a town near Cairo, leaving at least five people dead, security officials said.

A home that once belonged to a former United Nations secretary-general, the late U Thant, is being restored and will open as a new museum in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city.

Pope Francis on Saturday named a Spanish Franciscan to be the No. 2 at the Vatican's office for religious orders, his first appointment to the Vatican bureaucracy badly in need of a shakeup.

The operator of Japan's crippled nuclear plant said Saturday that it was moving tons of highly radioactive water from a temporary storage tank to another after detecting signs of leakage, in a blow to the plant's struggles with tight storage space.

A suicide bomber blew himself up Saturday at a lunch hosted by a Sunni candidate in Iraq's upcoming regional elections, killing 20 people, officials said.

Ikea says it has withdrawn 17,000 portions of moose lasagna from its home furnishings stores in Europe after traces of pork were found in a batch tested in Belgium.

Hundreds of thousands of members of a hardline Muslim group rallied in Bangladesh's capital on Saturday to demand authorities enact anti-blasphemy laws to punish people who insult Islam.

The British government says it believes terrorists are in the final stages of planning attacks in Somalia and urged U.K. nationals to leave the country.

Activists say Syrian government troops are clashing with rebels in a town outside Damascus, part of a belt of communities around the capital that have seen near-daily fighting in recent months.

Police arrested two builders as rescue workers on Saturday finished a two-day search for survivors in the collapse of a residential building being constructed illegally in India's financial capital. At least 72 people were killed in the accident, the worst house collapse in the country in recent decades.

Militants killed six Americans, including a young female diplomat, and an Afghan doctor Saturday in a pair of attacks in Afghanistan on Saturday. It was the deadliest day for the United States in the war in eight months.

A powerful 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit a remote part of eastern Indonesia on Saturday, causing residents to run outside in panic, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries, an official said.

Venezuela's animated campaign ahead of its April 14 presidential election has seen its share of shake-your-head remarks by both candidates: Interim President Nicolas Maduro of the ruling party, and opposition candidate Henrique Capriles. Here's a sampling:

The death toll in the collapse of a residential building being constructed illegally in India's financial capital rose to 72 Saturday amid diminishing hopes of finding any survivors alive, police said.

A weekend visit to Afghanistan by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is aimed at assessing the type and level of additional training that U.S. troops could provide to Afghan defense forces after 2014.

The death toll in the collapse of a residential building being constructed illegally in India's financial capital rose to 68 Saturday amid diminishing hopes of finding any survivors alive, police said.

The death toll in the collapse of a residential building being constructed illegally in India's financial capital rose to 68 Saturday amid diminishing hopes of finding any survivors alive, police said.

The North Korean factory park that is the last vestige of cooperation with the South moved closer to paralysis Saturday as nearly 100 South Korean workers went home across a border that Pyongyang has closed in the return direction.

A leading Cuban cultural official said Friday that he has been demoted nearly two weeks after he published an opinion piece in the New York Times that criticized "blatant racism" on the island.

Hundreds of federal police forced protesting teachers off the main highway between Mexico City and Acapulco Friday after the demonstrators blocked the roadway for hours, causing a huge traffic backup.

Mexico is looking to penetrate the Chinese market after a new report suggested that Mexican labor costs have fallen below those of China.

Abdulrahman al Shabati, his parents say, never had any connection to al Qaida. Instead, they insist, his decade-long detention at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is little more than a case of terrible luck.

An official says at least 36 people have been killed in a bus crash in which a gasoline tanker exploded in southwest Nigeria.

A Syrian government airstrike on a heavily contested neighborhood in the northern city of Aleppo on Saturday killed at least 15 people, including nine children, activists said.

A Cairo court on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit filed by an Islamist lawyer demanding that a popular Egyptian satirist's TV show be banned for allegedly insulting the president and containing excessive sexual innuendo.

In a story April 5, The Associated Press reported erroneously that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb denied in a statement France's claim of having killed senior commander Abou Zeid. AQIM did not name Abou Zeid as the commander they were discussing. Washington-based SITE Intelligence said it seemed the group was referring to the commander as Abou Zeid in the English-language translation of the AQIM statement.

A new report on American aid to Haiti in the wake of that country's devastating earthquake finds much of the money went to U.S.-based companies and organizations.

Venezuela's opposition presidential candidate says he'll cut off subsidized oil to Cuba, distance his country from nations that disrespect human rights and shore up the South American country's own troubled economy with the billions it now sends abroad to socialist friends.

A British-educated lawmaker from a prominent political family was named Lebanon's new prime minister Saturday, and vowed to work toward ending divisions in the nation and preventing the civil war in neighboring Syria from spilling over into the country.

Spanish authorities say a rockfall has derailed a train, injuring 11 passengers after the first carriage partially plunged into a river just west of the northern city of Santander.