AP - To relaunch Middle East peace talks on Thursday, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and their American mediators quietly agreed to push aside the question of Hamas — the Islamic militant group that controls one of the two Palestinian territories and rejects negotiations.
AP - NATO said an airstrike in northern Afghanistan on Thursday killed about a dozen insurgents, but President Hamid Karzai said the victims were campaign workers seeking votes in this month's parliamentary elections.
AP - A new book claims renowned Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal worked for Israel's Mossad spy agency, providing information on war criminals and Germans working in Arab countries.
AP - A report detailing hundreds of gruesome attacks against civilians in Congo over a 10-year period won't be released until October, the U.N.'s top human rights official said Thursday, after Rwanda angrily protested the findings in a draft version.
AP - Census takers counting China's more than 1.3 billion people already face a daunting task, and it's getting harder for the latest once-a-decade update.
Reuters - A new wave of wildfires swept through villages in southern Russia on Thursday, killing at least two people and destroying hundreds of homes, officials and news reports said.
AP - Activists on Thursday hung posters across Cairo supporting Egypt's intelligence chief as a candidate in next year's presidential elections, the latest campaign to try to undermine a possible father-son succession in the Arab world's most populous nation.
AP - Suriname's new president, former dictator Desi Bouterse, reassumed power Thursday after being sidelined for a week by an illness that he now confirms was a bout of dengue fever.
Reuters - Sudan's referendum commission agreed on a key post on Thursday, ending a deadlock which has stalled plans for the January 9 southern vote on independence from the north against which it has fought decades of civil war.
AFP - Relief efforts in flood-ravaged Pakistan are being stretched by the "unprecedented scale" of the disaster, with the flow of international aid almost at a standstill, the UN said Thursday.
Reuters - China is stepping up attempts to hamper BHP Billiton's $39 billion hostile offer for Potash Corp, amid worries about future supplies of fertilizer it needs to rapidly boost food production.
Reuters - Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard inched closer to a return to power on Thursday after one of four independent lawmakers holding the balance of power threw his support behind her Labor Party.
McClatchy Newspapers - CORRE COYOTE, Mexico — Times are good for the dope growers of the western Sierra Madre mountains. The army eradication squads that once hacked at the illicit marijuana fields have been diverted by the drug war that's raging elsewhere in Mexico.
The Christian Science Monitor - As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas enter direct peace talks on Thursday, an intensifying battle for Jerusalem has rendered the conflict’s trickiest issue even more intractable.
Time.com - In an essay exclusively adapted for TIME from his new memoir, A Journey, Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair reflects on the U.S. Presidents he has known and worked with -- and on their country
OneWorld.net - MEXICO CITY, Sep 1 (IPS) - Activists in
Latin America have been galvanised by atrocities like the recent
massacre of 72 migrants near the U.S. border to step up their efforts on
behalf of migrant rights.
