The Muslim Brotherhood's candidate and a veteran of ousted leader Hosni Mubarak's autocratic regime will face each other in a runoff election for Egypt's president, according to first-round results Friday. The divisive showdown dismayed many Egyptians who fear either one means an end to any democraic gains produced by last year's uprising.

President Bashar Assad's forces killed at least 50 civilians, including 13 children, in central Syria on Friday, activists said, in one of the highest death tolls in one specific area since an internationally-brokered cease-fire went into effect last month.

Inspectors have located radioactive traces at an Iranian underground bunker, the U.N. atomic agency said Friday — a finding that could mean Iran has moved closer to reaching the uranium threshold needed to arm nuclear missiles.

Voice of America says it is investigating reports that a correspondent in Ethiopia's capital has been detained by authorities.

Hurricane Bud weakened Friday as it headed toward a string of laid-back beach resorts and small mountain villages on Mexico's Pacific coast south of Puerto Vallarta. Two people, one of them from France, were reported missing in a separate storm in Cuba.

French President Francois Hollande for the first time provided details of his plan to pull France's combat troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year, saying Friday he would leave around 1,400 soldiers behind to help with training and logistics.

Another round of U.N. climate talks closed Friday without resolving how to share the burden of curbing man-made global warming, mainly because countries don't agree on who is rich and who is poor.

Israeli archaeologists have discovered a rare trove of 3,000-year-old jewelry, including a ring and earrings, hidden in a ceramic jug near the ancient city of Megiddo, where the New Testament predicts the final battle of Armageddon.

An Israeli who rescued a distressed climber on Mount Everest instead of pushing onward to the summit said Friday that the man he helped, an American of Turkish origin, is like a brother to him.

As Greece creaks under its untenable debt and a shrinking economy, the possibility that it could stop using the euro is becoming increasingly likely. The effects of such a move would be as quick as they would be brutal for ordinary Greeks, who would essentially take a 50-percent pay cut just as pries soar.

Chinese President Hu Jintao has demanded senior Communist Party officials stifle tensions over the ousting of ambitious politician Bo Xilai and show unity as they prepare for a change of leadership, sources briefed on recent meetings said.

Egyptians began voting freely on Wednesday for the first time to pick their president in a wide open election that pits Islamists against men who served under deposed leader Hosni Mubarak.

At least 50 people, including 13 children, were killed when Syrian forces tried to break into the town of Houla in Homs province on Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and activists said.

Syria is struggling to meet its grain import needs because of sanctions, raising the risk of bread shortages that could sap public support for President Bashar al-Assad as he tries to snuff out a 15-month-old uprising.

The Department of Commerce is investigating Chinese telecommunications equipment maker ZTE Corp for allegedly selling embargoed U.S. computer products to Iran.

Two al Qaeda-linked suicide bombers targeting Shi'ite Muslims blew themselves up at a school and a protest march in northern Yemen on Friday killing at least 12 people, the defence ministry said.

The French left will comfortably beat the conservative UMP party in next month's parliamentary election, a poll showed on Friday, as rivalries triggered by Nicolas Sarkozy's defeat in the race for the presidency risk splitting the right-wing vote.

(Reuters) - A private detective working for Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers used a legally questionable tactic to obtain a hotel bill that a New York financier ran up at one of London's swankest hotels, records reviewed by Reuters show.

U.N. nuclear inspectors have found uranium traces in an Iranian underground site refined to a somewhat higher level than the enrichment work normally done there, but still well below the weapons-grade threshold, diplomatic sources said on Friday.

Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov sacked his oil and gas minister, citing his poor performance on state television on Friday, just two days after the Central Asian nation agreed landmark deals to supply natural gas to Pakistan and India.