World Politics News

ANKARA, Turkey - Patrons of a usually smoke-filled hookah bar stepped outside to light up Sunday as Turkey extended a ban on indoor public smoking to bars, restaurants and coffeehouses.

ROMANO CANAVESE, Italy - A beaming Pope Benedict XVI raised his cast-encased right arm to bless thousands of faithful Sunday during his first public appearance since surgery to set a wrist fractured in a fall.

KIEV, Ukraine - Vice President Joe Biden is visiting Georgia and Ukraine starting Monday, meeting leaders eager for further reassurance that Washington still supports their joining NATO and that its effort to warm relations with Russia won't come at their expense.

MOSCOW - When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, it was a first for the Soviet Union — the first time the U.S. had beaten the U.S.S.R in the space race.

MOSCOW - Russian aviation agency tells news agencies 15 dead in Kandahar, Afghanistan helicopter crash.

KRAKOW, Poland - Emerging from the quiet of her convent, Sister Anastazja Pustelnik was confronted by a jarring image — her smiling face on posters plastered around town to hawk the cookbooks that have made the 59-year-old nun one of Poland's best-selling authors.

GENEVA - A U.N. labor tribunal ordered the global body's weather agency to pay damages to a former auditor fired in 2006 after clashing with the organization's top official over a corruption probe.

NEW YORK - A handyman at a skyscraper near the World Trade Center pleaded not guilty Saturday to charges he murdered a cleaning woman and hid her body in the tower's ventilation system.

BEIRUT - Villagers threw stones at U.N. peacekeeping troops in southern Lebanon Saturday, lightly injuring 14 soldiers, in an attempt to prevent an investigation near the site of a recent explosion, a spokeswoman said.

KATHMANDU (AFP) - United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recommended in a report released Saturday that the UN's special mission to Nepal be extended for another six months.

LONDON - Only death could silence Henry Allingham.

ROME - News agencies are reporting that a coroner has challenged DNA evidence linking an Italian to the 2007 killing of a British student in the central Italian town of Perugia.

ROME - An Italian aid worker held captive in the Philippine jungle for six months by al-Qaida-linked militants returned home to celebrations in his small Tuscan town on Saturday.

ULLAPOOL, Scotland - An unholy row has broken out over a ferry company's decision to sail on Sunday between a remote Scottish island and the mainland.

LONDON - The crew of a U.S. Navy ship made history on Saturday by delivering a keg of wine to the Tower of London.

ROME - For the first time in Italy's wine-steeped history, a city government has banned alcohol for those under 16 in an effort to curb drinking problems among youths.

NACHTERSTEDT, Germany - A mudslide undermined a house and buried it in a crater along a lake shore in central Germany on Saturday. Three people who lived in it were missing.

MOSCOW - The respected Russian human rights group Memorial is stopping work at its office in the republic of Chechnya after the kidnapping and killing of one of its most daring activists, a Russian radio station quoted an official of the group as saying Saturday.