Assassination

A spate of car bombs and shootings mostly in Shiite areas of Baghdad on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq killed at least 12 people on Tuesday, officials said.

Pakistani lawmakers on Monday repeated their call for former military ruler Pervez Musharraf to be arrested and tried for treason on his return home from self-imposed exile in Dubai.

Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, a former German army lieutenant who took part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, has died at the age of 90, a think tank he co-founded said Wednesday.

The former commander of a South African apartheid hit squad that carried out assassinations for the white minority regime, has died, his hospital said Thursday.

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki on Thursday testified in the murder probe of Chokri Belaid, his office said in a statement, after the opposition leader's family said he had received death threats.

President Barack Obama's administration is looking at easing the secrecy around the drone war against Al-Qaeda by shifting control for some air strikes from the CIA to the US military, officials say.

Park Geun-Hye became South Korea's first female president Monday, vowing zero tolerance with North Korean provocation and demanding Pyongyang "abandon its nuclear ambitions" immediately.

A US senator has said an estimated 4,700 people, including some civilians, have been killed in the contentious bombing raids of America's secretive drone war, local media reported Wednesday.

Armenia's incumbent President Serzh Sarkisian was set to be re-elected in presidential elections Monday with 58 percent of the vote, an exit poll by Gallup said after close of polls.

Armenians voted Monday in presidential polls marked by lack of any serious challenge to incumbent President Serzh Sarkisian and shadowed by an assassination attempt against a rival candidate.

Armenia votes in presidential polls Monday with incumbent leader Serzh Sarkisian set for victory in an election watched closely as a test of the ex-Soviet state's democratic credentials but marked by an absence of any serious opposition challenge.

A Sri Lankan newspaper vowed it would not be intimidated on Sunday after an investigative reporter survived an assassination bid, the latest in a string of attacks against the country's media.

The Foreign Office voiced its shock and serious concern Saturday over the shooting of a British-Sri Lankan journalist in a Colombo suburb.

The chief minister of a restive northwestern Pakistani province on the frontline of the fight against homegrown militants survived a Taliban suicide bombing assassination bid on Friday.

The killers of Lebanon's former premier Rafiq Hariri will be punished "sooner or later," his son Saad said on Thursday's eighth anniversary of his father's death, for which four Hezbollah members are being tried in absentia.

US Secretary of State John Kerry vowed Thursday that the United States would stand by Lebanon as he marked the eighth anniversary of the killing of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Chokri Belaid, a senior leader in Tunisia's left-leaning opposition Democratic Patriots party, was shot dead Wednesday morning, his brother told AFP.

A prominent Danish writer who heads a controversial group that claims free speech is under threat from Islam escaped an attempt on his life in Copenhagen, police said.

The Turk who shot pope John Paul II in St Peter's Square in 1981 claimed in a new book on Friday that the founder of the Iranian revolution, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, told him to do it.

Al-Qaeda's front group in Iraq has claimed a wave of violence in the past week that killed at least 88 people, including a Sunni MP who was assassinated by a suicide bomber, a statement said.