AP - Iran's president said in an interview broadcast Monday that he sees "common ground" with the West over his country's disputed nuclear program, and "new behavior" from the United States that could merit a positive response.

AP - French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy says her husband was not upset when he learned of all the nude photos she did during her modeling days.

AP - Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan served as a pallbearer at a funeral Monday for some of the 17 people killed by bombs in Turkey's biggest city, an attack the government blamed on Kurdish rebels who have targeted civilians in the past.

AP - Israel's prime minister backed away Monday from a target date — announced with great fanfare at a U.S.-hosted Mideast peace conference last November — for reaching a deal with the Palestinians by year's end.

AP - One detainee told of being beaten with pipes and having a screwdriver rammed into his back. Another said interrogators tied his hands behind his back then lifted him into the air by his bound wrists.

AP - Four suicide bombers believed to be women struck a Shiite pilgrimage in Baghdad and a Kurdish protest rally in northern Iraq on Monday, killing at least 57 people and wounding nearly 300 in one of this year's deadliest attacks, police said.

AFP - The Australian government insisted Monday that the country's banks were sound after news that major lender ANZ had increased provisions for bad debts led to a plunge in bank stocks.

AP - Nigeria's main militant group sabotaged two more oil pipelines Monday during its two-year campaign of attacks on the country's oil industry, a leader of the group told The Associated Press.

AP - Investigators found fragments that appeared to bolster the theory that an oxygen tank exploded on board a Qantas jet, forcing it to make an emergency landing with a car-sized hole in its fuselage, an official said Monday.

AP - In the flatlands north of Baghdad sits a prison with no prisoners. It holds something else: a chronicle of U.S. government waste, misguided planning and construction shortcuts costing $40 million and stretching back to the American overseers who replaced Saddam Hussein.