AP - A suicide car bomber hit the central market of a major city in Russia's North Caucasus on Thursday, killing at least 17 and wounding more than 130 people in one of the worst attacks in the volatile region in years, officials said.

AP - South Africa's murder rate, one of the highest in the world, has dropped by 8.6 percent to its lowest level in nearly two decades, according to statistics released Thursday.

AP - North Korea celebrated its 62nd anniversary Thursday with odes to supreme leader Kim Jong Il and pilgrimages to his late father's statue amid hints that a political meeting believed aimed at promoting his son as successor is imminent.

AP - Afghanistan's top prosecutor said Thursday that while President Hamid Karzai backs the work of Western-supported anti-corruption teams, he wants investigations to be led by Afghans and free of interference from international advisers.

AP - Some victims in a botched hostage rescue of a tourist bus in the Philippines may have been hit by police fire, the nation's top law enforcement official said Thursday.

AP - Four prisoners with links to al-Qaida being guarded by American troops escaped from a maximum-security prison in Baghdad and are still at large, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday.

AP - Cuba's communist economic model has come in for criticism from an unlikely source: Fidel Castro.

AFP - Eleven police recruits died and another four were injured when flames engulfed their barracks in a Cairo suburb on Thursday, a security official told AFP.