Revolts

Hundreds of civilians have died in fierce fighting between rebels and government forces here in Chad's capital, Red Cross officials said Tuesday, as the insurgents agreed to a cease-fire. Rebel leader Mahamat Nouri, leader of the biggest of three rebel groups in a coalition, told BBC radio Tuesday afternoon that the coalition accepted a Libyan-brokered cease-fire. Nouri said he did not think that the government had accepted.

Two top U.N. officials said Friday that the continuing conflict in Darfur had thwarted a yearlong effort to start peace talks and deploy a peacekeeping force there, while new conflict in neighboring Chad could ignite a regional war. U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno and the special envoy for Sudan, Jan Eliasson, told the Security Council that increasing clashes between Sudanese troops and rebels in western Darfur made it difficult to deliver aid to the area and deploy peacekeepers.

The leader of one of the biggest ethnic groups fighting Myanmar's military government was killed at his home in this border town Thursday, police said. Karen National Union General Secretary Mahn Sha, 64, was shot by two men, possibly as the result of differences within the rebel group, Thai police Col. Pasawat Tangjui said. No one has claimed responsibility.

A month after mobs burned down his hardware store and chased his family into a squalid displacement camp, Joseph Kamau, 35, decided it was time to go home. But he didn't return to the city he'd fled, Nakuru, where he was born, married and owns 5 acres of land. Instead Kamau and his family resettled in his grandparents' tribal homeland, known as Central province, where most fellow Kikuyu tribe members originated. Until now, Kamau had never set foot in this part of Kenya.

For many Kenyan athletes, the road to the Los Angeles Marathon and other major races unexpectedly turned life-threatening in late December when a disputed presidential election ignited unrest that left 1,000 people dead. At least two of them were runners -- and one was a former Olympian. The carnage since has given way to an uneasy peace in the wake of an agreement reached this week.

A Long Beach man who prosecutors say orchestrated an attack on the Cambodian government resulting in the deaths of three people and the wounding of several others was convicted Wednesday by a federal jury in Los Angeles of conspiring to kill in a foreign country. Yasith Chhun, president of the Long Beach-based Cambodian Freedom Fighters, was also convicted of three more conspiracy counts stemming from the Nov.

Lebanon's long-simmering political crisis lurched deeper into violent civil conflict Thursday as bands of Shiite and Sunni gunmen battled in the streets for a second day and politicians took to the airwaves to denounce each other for pushing the country toward war.

Zimbabwe hangs in a dangerous political limbo: A ruling party clique clings to power amid rumors of a coup if President Robert Mugabe loses the upcoming presidential runoff. His opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, far from facing down military hard-liners, has been out of the country for weeks, fearing assassination.

It looms solemnly over the shady corner of a city park, an incongruous emblem of pain amid a happy clamor of picnicking families and children chasing scuffed soccer balls. A granite echo of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, the 300-foot-long lead-colored monument serves as a kind of giant gravestone for the civil war that ripped El Salvador apart in the 1980s.

Fighting raged Thursday in a scenic valley in Pakistan's troubled northwest, killing at least 17 civilians, including seven members of a family whose home was hit by a mortar shell, local officials said. The violence, which broke out Tuesday, has been the worst in months in the Swat valley, about 100 miles from the capital, Islamabad. Militants seeking to impose a Taliban-style social code have been burning girls schools, attacking police posts and capturing paramilitary troops.