¤ President George W. Bush refused to comment on whether top White House aide Karl Rove will keep his job, saying he wanted to wait until an investigation is completed into his role in the leak of a CIA officer's name.
Questions on the leak scandal followed Mr Bush to Argentina, where protests over his free trade push greeted the US president at the 34-nation Summit of the Americas.
¤ Political unrest erupted beyond Ethiopia's capital, reportedly claiming four lives in a northern town, amid mounting international concern for the African giant's stability.
The four were killed and 11 people were wounded in the town of Bahir Dar, state-run television reported regional police officials as saying. It gave no further details of the deaths, the first outside Addis Ababa since the latest troubles began.
¤ Nearly a month after Pakistan's catastrophic earthquake, President Pervez Musharraf said he was postponing the purchase of F-16 warplanes from the United States to provide more relief to quake victims.
Mr Musharraf, visiting quake-hit regions on the Eid al-Fitr holiday yesterday, also said the world had not responded to the quake as generously as to last year's Asian tsunami because Western tourists weren't caught up in it.
¤ Two of Azerbaijan's leading opposition parties said police had arrested their campaign managers less than 48 hours before a parliamentary election seen as a test of democracy in the ex-Soviet state.
A spokesman for the National Front party said campaign boss Qabil Mamedzayev had been detained. Its partner in the main opposition bloc, the Democratic Party, said earlier its own campaign manager had been arrested.
¤ Syria will let UN investigators trying to identify the killers of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri question Syrian officials in Damascus on their own, the Syrian ambassador to London said.
Chief United Nations investigator Detlev Mehlis has complained that Syrian security figures interviewed in Damascus last month appeared to give only prepared responses. The Syrians had insisted that other officials attend the interviews.
¤ UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has decided to postpone a trip to Tehran in the wake of the Iranian president's threat to "wipe Israel off the map," UN sources and a US congressmen said.
Mr Annan had planned to visit the Iranian capital on a swing through the Middle East, beginning next week. But since the trip was arranged, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the remarks, which drew international condemnation.