AP - Thousands of Israelis prayed and cried at funerals Thursday for two soldiers whose return from Lebanon in black coffins touched off a nationwide wave of anguish.

AFP - Sprinter Dwain Chambers will discover on Friday if he can compete in next month's Beijing Olympics as the High Court prepapres to give its ruling over his bid to get a temporary injunction against his lifetime Olympic ban.

AP - Top diplomats from the U.S. and North Korea will meet next week along with their counterparts from regional nuclear talks, a South Korean official said Friday, the highest level of contact between the countries amid recent progress on Pyongyang's disarmament.

AP - Iraq's government hopes to bring the entire country under its security control by year's end. But one critical area stands in the way: the western province of Anbar, where the Sunni insurgency was born and later received its first blows from a civil uprising.

AP - Salim Hamdan is a small player with a big role. A former driver for Osama bin Laden, he is about to become the first Guantanamo prisoner to be tried for war crimes in a major test of the U.S. system for prosecuting alleged terrorists.

AP - Inferior electrical work by private contractors on U.S. military bases in Iraq is more widespread than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to a published report.

AP - Pope Benedict XVI on Friday urged religious leaders of all kinds to unite against those who use faith to divide communities — an apparent reference to terrorism in the name of religion.

Reuters - Pope Benedict on Thursday told a huge gathering of young people that they were inheriting a planet whose resources had been scarred and squandered to fuel insatiable consumption.

Reuters - Talks to resolve Zimbabwe's political crisis have stalled after opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai refused to sign a framework for negotiations, his party said on Thursday.

AP - Five militants freed in a prisoner swap with Israel prayed and laid wreaths at the grave of a slain Hezbollah commander Thursday, vowing to fight Israel as supporters showered them with rice.

AP - Kuwait's official news agency says the tiny Gulf country has named an ambassador to Iraq for the first time since the 1991 Gulf War.

AP - Thousands of Israelis prayed and cried at funerals Thursday for two soldiers whose return from Lebanon in black coffins touched off a nationwide wave of anguish.