Foreign

PARIS
French students protested Tuesday at campuses across the country but elsewhere the government welcomed signs that the mass movement to defend the right to retire at 60 was losing steam.
Lawmakers were expected to pass President Nicolas Sarkozy's unpopular pensions reform bill on Wednesday and Finance Minister Christine Lagarde hailed what she said was "a return to reason and dialogue."
And the union leaders who led strikes and street rallies of recent months

JERUSALEM
Hardline Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has commissioned a report on how to prepare for a nuclear-armed Iran as doubt mounts about the efficacy of preventive action, an Israeli source said on Monday.
Publicly, Israel has pledged to deny the Iranians the means to make a bomb but its previous, centrist govt also discreetly drew up "day after" contingency plans should Tehran's uranium enrichment pass the military threshold.
At the time, rightist

PARIS
President Nicolas Sarkozy hopes to put his titanic battle to raise France's retirement age behind him this week by signing the measure into law despite a new wave of strikes, rallies and fuel blockades.
With thousands of families heading off for school half-term holidays, and lawmakers expected to give the pensions bill their formal final approval on Wednesday, Sarkozy hopes the mass protest movement will die away.
But, with opinion polls showing the embattled

KABU
About 25 people may have been killed in a Nato airstrike in southern Afghanistan on Monday, an Afghan official said. Nato officials confirmed there had been an airstrike in Helmand province but said initial reports indicated that there were no civilian casualties.
The coalition was continuing to look into the operation, the officials said. The head of Helmand's provincial council, Fazal Bari, said local officials had told him that 25 people had been killed but that the

GUANTANAMO BAY US NAVAL BASE, Cuba
Canadian captive Omar Khadr pleaded guilty on Monday to all five terrorism charges against him in the US war crimes tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay naval base as part of a deal that would limit his sentence.
Khadr, who was captured in Afghanistan at age 15 and is now 24, admitted he conspired with al Qaeda and killed a US soldier with a grenade in Afghanistan. Before finalizing the plea, the judge said he would question Khadr to ensure the

CANCUN
Hurricane Richard pummeled the Central American nation of Belize with torrential rains and fierce winds early Monday after making landfall just south of low-lying Belize City.
Richard made landfall around 0045 GMT along the coast of Belize, about 35 kilometers south-southwest of Belize City, packing sustained winds of 150 kilometers per hour, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center said. Belize City is the largest city, with some 80,000 people, in the former British

KIEV
Ukraine is ready to discuss with Russia a joint venture between their state-run energy companies to exploit Russian gas fields, but it still rules out a merger of the two companies, Ukraine's Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said on Monday.
A press spokesman quoted Prime Minister Azarov as making his comments ahead of a visit to Kiev by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin when Ukraine is expected to call for Moscow to lower the price of Russian gas. Moscow has said it

PORT AU PRINCE
A multinational medical response has slowed deaths in a Haitian cholera epidemic that has killed more than 250 people so far, but the outbreak is likely to widen, a senior UN official said.
"We must gear up for a serious epidemic, even though we hope it won't happen," said Nigel Fisher, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Haiti. More than 3,000 cholera cases have been reported so far in the poor, quake-hit Caribbean nation, which is experiencing its

BAGHDAD
Iraq's highest court ordered parliament to resume its work on Sunday, nearly eight months after inconclusive elections left the country without a new government.
Federal Supreme Court spokesman Abdul Sattar Bayrakdar said parliament was ordered to convene and choose a new speaker, the first step to forming a coalition in Iraq, which has been without a government since the March 7 polls.
"In a decision taken today, the supreme court ordered parliament to return

KABUL
President Hamid Karzai Sunday stood by his pledge to dissolve private security firms in Afghanistan after Washington called for a solution to allow them to continue for a transition period.
"The government of Afghanistan is firm on its decision to dissolve these companies and wants the practical and genuine cooperation of the international community in implementing it," Karzai said at a meeting with senior Western officials in Kabul.
Karzai has ordered private

VATICAN CITY
Pope Benedict called on Islamic countries in the Middle East Sunday to guarantee freedom of worship to non-Muslims and said peace in the region was the best remedy for a worrying exodus of Christians.
He made his a appeal at a solemn mass in St Peter's Basilica ending a two week Vatican summit of bishops from the Middle East, whose final document criticised Israel and urged the Jewish state to end its occupation of Palestinian territories.
In his sermon at

JERUSALEM
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday urged the Palestinians not to abandon stalled peace talks in favour of an "unrealistic" appeal to the international community.
"We expect the Palestinians to honour their commitment to hold direct negotiations," Netanyahu said at the start of a weekly cabinet meeting. "I think that any attempt to bypass them by appealing to international bodies is unrealistic and will not give any impetus to a genuine diplomatic

LONDON
Washington on Sunday came under increasing pressure to investigate the allegations in the leaked Iraq war documents published by WikiLeaks, which Britain's deputy premier called "shocking".
Governments and human rights organisations alike put the focus on answers to the allegations made against the United States, allied and Iraqi troops as the whistleblowing website released 400,000 classified US military documents.
The flood of material from 2004 to 2009 offers

VATICAN CITY
Israel cannot claim Palestinian territory as its promised land citing the Bible to justify its occupation and the expulsion of Palestinians, a Catholic archbishop said Saturday.
Cyril Salim Bustros, head of the Greek Melkite Church in the United States, made his comments after the Middle East synod of Catholic bishops called on the United Nations to implement its resolutions and end Israeli occupation of Arab lands.
The synod's final statement, drawn up by

KABUL
Afghan officials accused NATO-led troops of killing two school boys in central Afghanistan on Saturday after a patrol came under fire by Taliban insurgents, as three suicide bombers wearing police uniforms and burqas attacked the UN office in western city of Herat on Saturday, senior police and UN officials said.
Civilian casualties caused by international troops while fighting insurgents are an emotive issue in Afghanistan, causing friction between President Hamid

BAGHDAD
Iraqi schoolteacher Fatima Razak does not need the WikiLeaks revelations to know about the scars of the US-led occupation, because she wears them on her disfigured face.
Every morning she looks in the mirror and relives the horror of 2007, when she says a bullet fired by a US soldier sliced through her cheek. Fatima was caught in a bottleneck at one of the numerous checkpoints the Americans set up throughout Baghdad after the 2003 US-led invasion.
She waited

PARIS
The French government struggled to restore fuel supplies on Saturday, but unions dug in their heels at strike-hit oil refineries after the Senate approved the pension reform bill at the heart of the dispute.
Despite weeks of protests and strikes that have hit railways and refineries hardest, the flagship reform of President Nicolas Sarkozy's term is expected to be finally adopted by Wednesday. On the first day of a 12-day mid-term school holiday, Transport Minister