Afghanistan Pakistan

South African President Jacob Zuma said Sunday that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi had accepted a "road map" for ending the conflict that pits his forces against rebels determined to end his four-decade rule. Zuma, who according to news reports led a delegation of African Union leaders in a meeting with Kadafi at his compound in Tripoli, did not disclose details of the cease-fire proposal. He also didn't specify whether Kadafi himself or his adjutants had accepted the African Union plan.

After surging in the polls in the campaign's final weeks, retired army officer and populist Ollanta Humala appeared to lead Peru's presidential race Sunday but was likely to face a runoff in June. With about 43% of the votes counted Sunday night, Peru's electoral commission and unofficial tallies put Humala ahead of his closest competitors, Keiko Fujimori, a former congresswoman and daughter of imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former economy and finance minister.

  In his first public speech since he was forced from power two months ago, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Sunday that he and his family were victims of a campaign by political enemies seeking to tarnish their reputation by exaggerating their wealth with false charges of corruption. The pre-recorded audio address came the same day the Egyptian prosecutor general's office announced that Mubarak and sons Gamal — who many believed would have been his successor — and Alaa were summoned for questioning regarding the violence that left about 300 people dead during the revolt that toppled the regime on Feb. 11. The legal move appeared to be an attempt by the country's ruling military council to appease protesters who have criticized the army for not moving swiftly enough to indict Mubarak and his inner circle.

Chinese police on Sunday detained more than 100 churchgoers who tried to hold an outdoor prayer service on a pedestrian bridge in Beijing after having failed to secure permission to open a church. Although it is not uncommon for police to raid unregistered churches, the bust in the very heart of the capital suggests that the dragnet around activists, bloggers, lawyers and intellectuals now includes Christian groups that in the past were able to slide under the radar. The 8-year-old Shouwang Church, with a congregation of about 1,000, has been popular among young professionals and academics.

United Nations and French helicopters in Ivory Coast on Sunday attacked the home and presidential palace of the country's longtime leader, who has refused to step down since an election in November in which the U.N. says he was defeated. The attacks on Laurent Gbagbo's residence and the presidential palace mark the United Nations' second military intervention, after similar assaults a week earlier. The U.N. said Friday that forces loyal to Gbagbo used a cease-fire Tuesday as a ploy to consolidate and gain ground in Abidjan.

Violent repercussions of a Koran-burning at an obscure Florida evangelical church shook Afghanistan again Saturday, with authorities in the southern city of Kandahar reporting nine people killed in furious street protests a day after an attack on the U.N. headquarters in a northern city left seven foreigners dead. More than 80 people were injured in Saturday's daylong rioting in Kandahar, the city that the Taliban movement considers to be its spiritual home. Demonstrators torched cars, smashed windows and occupied a school building, a provincial spokesman said.

For four decades, the Assad family has used secret police and informants to rule Syria with an iron fist. Now the family and its Baath Party face the biggest threat to their power since 1982, when security forces killed more than 10,000 people and razed the city of Hama to quash an Islamist rebellion. On Friday, protests rippled across Syria, spreading from the restive southern town of Dara to the capital, Damascus, and again to Hama, the latest sign that no Middle Eastern country ?

Pakistan on Friday pulled out of upcoming talks with the U.S. on the war in Afghanistan, a move meant to convey Islamabad's anger over an American drone missile strike that it says killed a gathering of civilians along the Afghan border. The U.S. and Pakistan disagree on who was killed in the strike Thursday in North Waziristan, a volatile tribal region that serves as a stronghold for an array of militant groups, including Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani network, a wing of the Afghan Taliban that regularly attacks U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Friday warned allies against "ill-timed, precipitous or uncoordinated" drawdowns of their troops from Afghanistan that could harm gains made against Taliban militants. Gates aimed to discourage allies in Europe from using the Obama administration's plans to withdraw some troops beginning in July as a pretext to bring out large numbers of their own forces. The planned withdrawals are expected to be a small percentage of the overall U.S. force, but if allies with only a few thousand soldiers or fewer bring out similar numbers it could cause problems, officials said.

Japan's most punishing earthquake on record and the devastating tsunami it triggered plunged the heart of the densely populated island nation into an apocalyptic scene of blazing buildings, cratered highways, waterborne rubble and frenzied efforts to avert radiation leaks at damaged nuclear power plants. Japan Broadcasting Corp. said more than 1,000 people had died, mostly in the northeastern part of the country. The death toll is expected to rise once disaster-response teams reach the hardest-hit areas and assess casualties, the National Police Agency and Defense Ministry said Saturday.The force of the magnitude 8.9 quake, which seismologists said released 1,000 times the energy of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, broke the foundations under homes and buildings and opened chasms in fields and pavement, swallowing cars and shearing off sidewalks and driveways.