Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has requested a meeting with 700 Italian women during his historic visit to Rome this week, when he is setting up his tent in the grounds of a 17th century villa on a hill above the city.
Colonel Gaddafi, who has a women-only corps of bodyguards, held a similar meeting on a visit to Paris in 2007 with 1,000 selected women guests, who were told he wanted to "save European women."
He is making his first visit to Libya's former colonial ruler Italy since he took power in a coup in 1969.
Among the requests for his visit - pitching his tent is routine on foreign visits by the nomadic-born Libyan leader - is a meeting with 700 women from Italian political, business and cultural life. They will include Equal Opportunities Minister Mara Carfagna whose appointment last year raised eyebrows because, as a former model, she had been the subject of public flirting by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, angering his now estranged wife.
Pleads guilty in crash hoax
A US money manager has pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from a plot to fake his own death in a small plane crash in Florida in an attempt to avoid financial fraud charges in Indiana.
Marcus Schrenker, 38, parachuted out of his plane over Alabama in January and let it continue to fly on autopilot before it eventually crashed in Florida. He parachuted safely near the Alabama city of Harpersville, convinced a police officer to give him a ride to a hotel and then fled. He previously had stashed a motorcycle near the hotel and got away before local police learned of the plane crash. He was arrested a day later at a Florida campsite and taken to a hospital with wounds to his wrists that apparently resulted from a suicide attempt.
Mr Schrenker at the time was wanted on fraud charges alleging that he misled people who invested money with his financial management companies and misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Children die in day-care fire
The death toll from a fire at a day-care centre in Mexico rose to 41 children with 23 more hospitalised, many with life-threatening burns,.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon ordered an investigation into last Friday's fire at the ABC day-care centre in Hermosillo to find who is to blame.
As flames blocked the centre's doorway, employees and neighbours used cars to punch holes through a wall and stumbled over unconscious infants and toddlers as they tried to rescue them, witnesses said.
Smoke inhalation killed many children before rescuers could reach them, with the victims ranging in age from a few months old to about three years old.
Murder involves sex, power and wealth
A French woman goes on trial this week for the murder of her French financier lover in a crime combining sex, power and wealth that rocked Geneva's discreet banking circles.
Edouard Stern, 50, the 38th richest man in France, whose friends included President Nicolas Sarkozy, was shot dead in his apartment in the Swiss city on February 28, 2005. His body, with four bullet holes, was found clad in a latex suit.
Cecile Brossard, his long-time lover and an artist who is now 40, confessed to killing him with his own pistol after an argument over $1 million. The man put the money into her Swiss account after she demanded it, saying it would be "proof of his love for her" and then blocked it after she refused to return it, court documents show.
A jury will hear whether she should be convicted of murder, which carries a maximum ten-year prison term, or a crime of passion, a 10-year maximum.
Air France crash
Brazilian search crews have retrieved more bodies from a crashed Air France flight which disappeared last Monday in the Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board.
Navy ships found the bodies and debris including a blue seat with a serial number matching Air France Flight 447, a rucksack containing a vaccination card, and a briefcase with an Air France ticket inside.
Rescuers believe many bodies have been devoured by sharks.
The doomed Air France plane sent 24 automated messages in a span of four minutes indicating a series of system failures before it vanished. In the stream of data one message showed inconsistent speed readings from the A330's sensors.
The search zone is a relatively uncharted patch of ocean that has deep ravines and a fine, muddy sediment.