KABUL, Afghanistan – An explosion hit the Afghan capital Saturday morning in an area that is home to foreign embassies and government offices.Zemeri Bashary, a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, said the blast occurred near the Afghan Foreign Ministry.A number of foreign embassies and offices of international organizations reside in the area.The cause of the explosion has not been
TIJU.N, Mexico – Police in the border city of Mexicali have arrested a purported top figure in Mexico's powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, authorities said Friday.Baja California state police arrested Manuel Garibay on Thursday while he was driving in Mexicali, across from Calexico, California, the state public security department said in a statement.Garibay, 52, was the Sinaloa cartel's link to
Paris – Jean-Marie Le Pen, who heads France's National Front party, has long peppered politics with right-wing bons mots. Now his daughter, Marine Le Pen, is showing that she, too, can make headlines.She called on President Nicolas Sarkozy to step down if implicated in a bribery case dating to 1995.She recently knocked France's racially diverse World Cup soccer team: I don't see myself rep
HUNTSVILLE, Ontario – The world's richest economies, saddled with huge debts after spending their way out of the credit crisis, papered over differences on Friday on how to clean up their finances with minimal damage to growth.Leaders from the Group of Eight, a club that spans the large industrialized nations and Russia, met in Canada before a broader summit with China and other rising eco
LIMA, Peru – A Peruvian judge on Friday denied a defense motion to void the confession of Joran van der Sloot in the murder of a 21-year-old Lima student because the attorney representing him at the time was state-appointed.Superior Court Judge Wilder Casique rejected the habeus corpus motion on behalf of Van der Sloot, who is jailed pending trial on charges of first-degree murder and robbe
BEIJING – When workers at a Honda transmission plant in China went on strike for higher wages last month, they touched off a domino effect of high-profile labor disputes.As the strikes, many of them at foreign-owned plants, rippled through China's southern manufacturing heartland, the government — usually quick to crush mass protests of any kind — did not step in, but allowed th
For the past two decades, Western nations have lunged between embracing Russia as a post-communist friend and confronting it as a recidivist foe.That alternation is now surging to the positive side.On Thursday, President Obama affectionately greeted his Russian opposite, Dmitri Medvedev, at the White House.Less than a week earlier, French leader Nicolas Sarkozy pitched similar love in Moscow's di
CONAKRY, Guinea – Just a few months ago, Guinea was a battered nation devoid of hope, ruled by an out-of-control army captain whose troops massacred pro-democracy demonstrators and raped women.Today, the West African country is on the verge of putting half a century of coups and repressive rule behind it — through a presidential election Sunday that would be its first-ever free ballot