AP - President Hugo Chavez ordered the U.S. ambassador to leave Venezuela within 72 hours on Thursday, accusing the diplomat of conspiring against his government and saying he would also withdraw his own envoy from Washington immediately.

AP - The widow was nervous the first time she shot a loaded Kalashnikov rifle at the dusty Iraqi police academy north of Baghdad. But she was smiling after she fired 160 rounds at a black-and-white target.

AP - A suspected U.S. missile strike killed 12 people in northwestern Pakistan on Friday and fighting at another militant stronghold near the Afghan border killed dozens more, officials said.

AFP - Pakistani troops backed by tanks and fighter jets Thursday killed as many as 100 militants in a restive northwestern tribal area near the Afghan border, officials said.

AP - Police divers searching a river Thursday pulled out a red duffel bag holding a small skull, bones and clothes they said probably was the body of a 4-year-old French girl believed killed by her mother's lover — the child's grandfather.

AFP - Sweden's Robert Karlsson gave Europe a Ryder Cup boost ahead of next week's clash with the USA with a first round 67 at the Mercedes-Benz Championship here on Thursday.

AP - A fire broke out Thursday on a train shuttling trucks under the English Channel between England and France, injuring six people and suspending traffic in the undersea tunnel, officials said.

AP - North Korea's Kim Jong Il had brain surgery after a stroke last month and could have partial paralysis on one side, media reports said Thursday, after the South Korean government said the communist leader remained in control of his country.

AP - Over the past 20 years, Japan has had 13 prime ministers. In a pattern rarely seen outside the communist world, individual leaders have come and gone, but the ruling party has remained the same.

AP - Pakistan's prime minister on Thursday backed a harsh rebuke of the U.S. by the Muslim nation's military chief, a sign of a strain in relations seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks forged the two countries' anti-terror alliance.

AP - Militants killed two U.S. soldiers eastern Afghanistan on the anniversary of 9/11, making 2008 the deadliest year yet for American forces in the country that sheltered al-Qaida while it plotted the terror attacks on New York and Washington.