Oceania

AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Wednesday that countries trying to "sow chaos" in Syria could be infected with it themselves, an apparent warning to Arab Gulf nations that back the insurgency aimed at forcing him from power. Assad's remarks, to a Russian TV channel, came after U.N. staff monitoring an increasingly shaky ceasefire were caught up in an attack that killed at least 21 people, and had to spend a night with rebel forces. ...

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David Cameron is set to step up his demands for action to tackle the eurozone crisis as he heads to the United States for a two-summit weekend with world leaders.

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A young woman who survived multiple gunshot wounds inflicted by right-wing extremist Anders Breivik at a youth camp in Norway has told a court about being shot in the face.

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Body bags containing the victims of a Russian jet crash began arriving in the Indonesian capital Saturday as Russian investigators flew in to join the probe into how the aircraft smashed into the side of a volcano.

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CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez headed home on Friday after a series of cancer radiation treatments in Cuba to a nation fretting over his health five months before a presidential election. Photos issued by the Venezuelan government showed Chavez smiling as he bade farewell to Cuban President Raul Castro at the airport before boarding the flight back on Friday evening. But the images, showing Chavez from the waist up dressed in loose-fitting sports clothes, gave few clues to the real state of health of a man only seen once in public in the last month. ...

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The countdown to the London 2012 Games began in earnest as the world watched the Olympic Flame being lit in ancient Olympia.

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DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Two bombs detonated on a central Damascus highway on Saturday, destroying nine cars, residents said, in a further sign that rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad are shifting tactics towards homemade explosives. There were no immediate reports of casualties from the blasts from bombs planted under cars on al-Thawra Street, the latest blow to last month's crumbling U.N.-backed truce. ...

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Colombian authorities are unsure that leftist FARC guerrillas took a French reporter hostage, President Juan Manuel Santos said, nearly a week since Romeo Langlois went missing.

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Blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng phoned in to a US congressional hearing Thursday from his Beijing hospital room, pleading for help from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to get to the United States.

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ARLINGTON, Virginia (Reuters) - Newt Gingrich ended his run for U.S. president on Wednesday after dazzling in televised debates but slumping to defeat in Republican primaries under a barrage of attack ads portraying him as a Washington insider. The former U.S. House of Representatives speaker, the face of the Republican Party in the mid-1990s, badly trailed front-runner Mitt Romney in polls and his campaign piled up a debt of $4.3 million (2.6 million pounds). ...

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