BANGKOK, Thailand A grenade attack on anti-government protesters occupying the Thai prime minister's office wounded eight people early Saturday, officials said.

GOMA, Congo Congo's rebel leader is expected to hold his first public rally Saturday in the territory his fighters seized during a lightning advance last month in the eastern part of the country.

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan A bomb killed eight mourners at the funeral of a slain Shiite cleric Friday in northwestern Pakistan, triggering rioting and heightening sectarian tension in the volatile region.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia Malaysia's top Islamic body on Saturday ruled against Muslims practicing yoga, saying it has elements of other religions that could corrupt Muslims.

POTSDAM, Germany Germany is dropping its pursuit of a ban on Scientology after finding insufficient evidence of illegal activity, security officials said Friday. Domestic intelligence services will continue to monitor the group, officials said. The German branch of the Los Angeles-based Church of Scientology has been under observation by domestic intelligence services for more than a decade. Top security officials asked state governments in December to begin gathering information on whether they had sufficient grounds to seek a ban.

CORNWALLIS, Nova Scotia Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday he would like to add significant U.S. forces to the war in Afghanistan before national elections scheduled for next year, and that grim depictions of backsliding in the seven-year-old war are "far too pessimistic."

MEXICO CITY Investigators said Friday that they have found evidence of irregularities in the training records of at least one of the pilots handling a jet that crashed earlier this month, killing Mexico's interior secretary.

LIMA, Peru In a last dash of diplomacy, President George W. Bush on Friday sought China's help in pinning down North Korea to keep its shaky promises of nuclear disarmament.

TOKYO Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo departed Saturday for Los Angeles from Osaka, where her plane made an emergency landing in Japan the previous day after her husband fell ill on board, according to media reports.

PARIS A vote tally between two women vying to head the Socialist Party and lead the opposition against France's conservative president was too close to call, a senior party official said early Saturday.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia Malaysia's top Islamic body has ruled against Muslims practicing yoga.

YANGON, Myanmar Myanmar's courts continued a crackdown on activists Friday, handing out a 45-year prison sentence to a comedian who went to the delta to help cyclone victims and criticized the junta's slow relief response.

BANGKOK, Thailand A grenade attack on anti-government protesters occupying the Thai prime minister's office wounded eight people early Saturday, officials said.

SOFIA, Bulgaria Archaeologists have unearthed an elaborately decorated 1,800-year-old chariot sheathed in bronze at an ancient Thracian tomb in southeastern Bulgaria, the head of the excavation said Friday. "The lavishly ornamented four-wheel chariot dates back to the end of the second century A.D.," Veselin Ignatov told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the site, near the southeastern village of Karanovo.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega moved to quash a legislative proposal by opposition politicians Friday to cancel the results of widely disputed elections, as thousands of Sandinista supporters took to the streets to celebrate the party's victory.

UNITED NATIONS A key U.N. committee criticized Myanmar and North Korea on their human rights records Friday, and also targeted Iran despite its efforts to block the vote.

As of Friday, Nov. 21, 2008, at least 4,202 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

NEW YORK Libya wants to open a new chapter in relations with the United States by tapping into a major government fund to invest in U.S. companies and sending thousands of students to study in America, the son of Libya's leader said Friday.

PISCO, Peru U.S. first lady Laura Bush is touring a region of Peru struck by an earthquake last year.

GUATEMALA CITY Three adults and a 1-year-old baby have died in what Guatemalan police believe may have been a violent family dispute over an inheritance.

MEXICO CITY Mexico accused its former drug czar Friday of taking $450,000 from a cartel he was supposed to destroy, going public with a scandal that deals a serious blow to the country's U.S.-backed drug war.

BAGHDAD Chanting "no to America," supporters of a radical Shiite cleric burned an effigy of President George W. Bush Friday in a protest demanding parliament scuttle a U.S.-Iraqi security pact and American troops begin withdrawing from Iraq immediately.

MOSCOW A top Russian anti-AIDS coordinator on Friday lambasted the government's approach to fighting HIV, saying the number of registered cases was growing 10 percent a year despite increased federal funding.

DRESDEN, Germany Top-seeded Russia held off the United States in the 38th Chess Olympiad in round eight of open division play Friday, but the Armenian team crushed France and stayed in first place.

BAGHDAD Tens of thousands of followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr packed a central Baghdad square Friday, where they protested a U.S.-Iraq security agreement and likened Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to fallen dictator Saddam Hussein.

GENEVA A U.N. panel urged the Chinese government on Friday to apologize to the victims of its crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square 19 years ago.

ROME The party that Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi created more than a decade ago moved ahead with a plan to abandon its name and dissolve into another conservative bloc.

BEIJING The spectacular fireworks were long over and the Olympic athletes had all gone home. But for Cai Shanhai and his wife, He Jingfeng, it was still a moment to savor as they stared up at the soaring steel arches of the Bird's Nest national stadium this week.

ALGIERS, Algeria In a Nov. 20 story about African negotiations on global warming, The Associated Press erroneously reported that China refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. China has signed and ratified the pact, but like other developing nations was not asked to reduce its emissions under the 1997 protocol.

GENEVA Greece, Turkey and Belarus have missed deadlines to destroy their land mine stockpiles, as required under an international treaty, said a report Friday by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

LONDON Britain's foreign policy chief said Friday that Iran continues to pose the most serious threat to the world, warning that Tehran's suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons risks an arms race across the Middle East.

BERLIN Germany has banned Hezbollah's television station on grounds that it violates the country's constitution, an Interior Ministry spokesman said Friday.

VIENNA, Austria A senior Syrian official on Friday all but ruled out new visits by U.N. inspectors probing allegations that his country had a covert program that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

MEXICO CITY Hiroshi Nohara is on a layover at the Mexico City airport. It has lasted almost three months, and he has no plans to leave.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands Amsterdam will close almost a fifth of its marijuana cafes to comply with a national ban on having them near schools, the mayor said Friday.

ALGIERS, Algeria Al-Qaida's offshoot in Algeria has carried out fewer terror attacks this year but some of those had a high number of casualties, an academic study said Friday.

VATICAN CITY A high-ranking Vatican official says Pope Benedict XVI is considering introducing a change to the Mass liturgy.

MOSCOW The voyage of the cruiser Peter the Great, scheduled to arrive in Venezuela next week with a squadron of other Russian warships, was meant to showcase the Kremlin's ability to project naval power abroad and reassert its claim to great power status.

MOGADISHU, Somalia A radical Islamic group in Somalia said Friday it will fight the pirates holding a Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million worth of crude oil.

GOMA, Congo The director of Congo's Virunga Park says rangers who fled fighting between rebels and soldiers are returning to protect its endangered mountain gorillas.

LONDON After the wedding in a Scottish castle, the mansion on a green English estate and the drinks in their own pub, Madonna and Guy Ritchie's eight-year marriage ended Friday in a dreary London courtroom.

DHARMSALA, India Out of the hundreds of Tibetan leaders who have flocked here for a pivotal summit on Tibet's future, few understand the hardships there better than a recently arrived barley farmer.

BRUSSELS, Belgium European culture went digital - but it only lasted a day.

HARARE, Zimbabwe The World Health Organization said Friday that 294 people have died from a cholera outbreak exacerbated by the country's collapsing health care system.

JERUSALEM Palestinians fired a rocket at an Israeli city near the Gaza Strip on Friday but caused no casualties, police said, as the Israeli military continued its closure of all crossings into the coastal territory because of ongoing rocket fire.

BRUSSELS, Belgium NATO is unlikely to follow the European Union in quickly re-establishing contacts with Russia that were suspended after the war in Georgia, senior U.S. officials said Friday.

BEIRUT, Lebanon Lebanese soldiers clashed with gunmen in a northern port city on Friday, killing one and wounding others, the army said.

PARIS A French judge has filed preliminary anti-terrorist charges against the suspected leader of the Basque separatist group ETA, a judicial official said Thursday.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan A suicide bomber drove his car into the gate of an army base in southern Afghanistan on Friday and detonated his explosives, killing three civilians, a provincial official said.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa A white teenager has received four life sentences for a shooting spree that killed four blacks and wounded eight, re-igniting racial tensions in post-apartheid South Africa.