The shadowy financial adviser of the late Yasser Arafat is being sought on suspicion he stole millions of dollars in public funds, the top Palestinian anti-corruption campaigner said Wednesday.

Twenty years after his troops began brutally ethnically cleansing Bosnian towns and villages of non-Serbs, Gen. Ratko Mladic went on trial Wednesday at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal accused of 11 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Syrian President Bashar Assad has told a Russian state news channel that his country supports his reform agenda.

The negotiating stance from Iranian officials never varies: The Islamic Republic will not give up its capabilities to make nuclear fuel. But embedded in the messages are meanings that reach beyond Tehran's talks with world powers.

Convicted war criminal and former Liberian President Charles Taylor told judges at his sentencing hearing Wednesday that he sympathizes with victims of the civil war in Sierra Leone he helped foment, and judges should render their sentence against him in a spirit of "reconciliation, not retribution."

Spain's prime minister warned Wednesday that the country faced the danger of being locked out of international markets as investors continued to fret about the future of the euro and Greece's place in the 17-country eurozone.

A Congolese general already sought on an international arrest warrant for his alleged use of child soldiers during an earlier conflict has forcibly recruited another 149 boys and teenagers since April, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation published Wednesday.

A blind Chinese activist who sparked a diplomatic crisis by fleeing into the U.S. Embassy last month filled out a Chinese passport application and posed for a photo Wednesday, moving forward in his bid to study in the United States.

China has released a documentary accusing the Dalai Lama of orchestrating a wave of self-immolations by Tibetans, in its most elaborate attempt so far to shape international opinion about the protests against Chinese rule.

Whatever they may have thought of his politics, anyone lucky enough to have conversed with author Carlos Fuentes couldn't help but be taken by his patrician good looks and his love affair with language.

Greece's radical leftist leader spurned an invitation from the president for a final round of coalition talks on Monday, all but ensuring a new election that he is poised to win.

China has been quietly and gently pressuring North Korea to scrap plans for a third nuclear test, said two sources with knowledge of closed-door discussions between the countries, but there is no indication how the North will react.

Francois Hollande will be sworn in as France's first Socialist president in 17 years in a hurried ceremony on Tuesday before a dash to Berlin to challenge German Chancellor Angela Merkel's focus on austerity policies.

Anders Behring Breivik roared a "battle cry" and appeared both angry and joyous as he shot people one by one with a distorted face, survivors of the Norwegian far-right killer's massacre told a court on Wednesday.

Syrian troops backed by tanks shot dead seven civilians when they overran a rebellious Sunni Muslim village west of the city of Hama on Sunday, activists' organizations said, in a crackdown on the rural epicenter of the 14-month anti-government revolt.

Leaders of the scandal-plagued Legionaries of Christ religious order knew that their most famous priest had fathered a child for many months before they acknowledged it this week, a top Vatican official told Reuters on Wednesday.

As armored vehicles rumble past bullet-scarred streets, Lebanese men heckle soldiers they have now added to their list of enemies: "There go the traitors!"

Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov on Wednesday brushed aside Western concerns about his government's treatment of opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko as misguided and unwarranted, indicating that Kiev was unlikely to change its mind.

China may have sown the seeds of its next human rights row with the United States even as it looks to end the current one over blind dissident Chen Guangcheng, with its treatment of him inspiring a band of lawyers to join his human-rights battle.

Iran's talks with the U.N. nuclear watchdog about Tehran's atomic programme are going well, a senior Iranian official said on Tuesday, the second day of discussions.