Milan magistrates invited Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for questioning in a probe into whether he tried to bribe a witness in a fraud case, but he declined to turn up, judicial sources said on Thursday.

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Austria takes over the European Union presidency on January 1 after a year of setbacks for the 25-nation bloc, hoping to set its goals with domestic concerns in mind and lower expectations of policy breakthroughs.

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A former prisoner held by the US military with senior officials of Saddam Hussein's ousted Iraqi regime charged Wednesday that fellow detainees had been tortured, some of them to death. Abdel Jabbar al-Kubaisi, a onetime

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A South Korean panel dealt a devastating blow to discredited scientist Hwang Woo-suk on Thursday, concluding his once-celebrated team provided no data to prove a claim they had produced tailored embryonic stem cells. The findings

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India announced Thursday that it would pay an additional 160 million dollars to victims of anti-Sikh riots that erupted after the 1984 assassination of Congress premier Indira Gandhi. "Payment of compensation to the riot victims

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A small plane carrying three people crashed in a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska Thursday morning. Police could not immediately confirm whether the people on board were injured when the plane crashed shortly after 10 am

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Israeli chief of staff General Dan Halutz on Thursday ruled out the prospect of a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear installations in the near future. "I don't think that a military intervention against Iran's nuclear

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Norwegian-led truce monitors warned Thursday that war "may not be far away" in Sri Lanka and urged an immediate end to spiralling violence as officials said two more rebels were shot dead. Troops killed two

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Indonesia withdrew its final contingent of non-local troops from Aceh Thursday, fulfilling a key pledge made in an historic peace accord between separatist guerrillas and the government. The pact signed in August in Helsinki was

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Two Palestinian civilians and an Israeli officer were killed Thursday by a suicide bomber who blew himself up at an army checkpoint set up to avert a major attack during a Jewish festival. The bombing

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