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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argued before a U.N. anti-racism conference Monday that Israel is a "paragon of racism" founded on "the pretext of Jewish sufferings" during World War II.

The comments, a hard-edged version of Ahmadinejad's often-repeated anti-Zionist views, prompted several dozen European diplomats to walk out of the opening session of the week-long Geneva meeting, which the Obama administration and eight other Western nations already were boycotting. In addition, a handful of pro-Israel demonstrators shouting "shame, shame" and "racist, racist" threw red clown noses at the podium and prevented Ahmadinejad from entering a room where he was to hold a news conference.

The uproar seemed to douse any hopes that the gathering would prove more successful than the first U.N. anti-racism conference, in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. That meeting also became a forum for vitriolic condemnation of Israel.

Leaders from the Western Hemisphere, inspired by a new American president, closed a two-day summit meeting proclaiming a new dawn for relations in the region, which had been marked by bitter disagreements in recent years with the United States.

Despite the warm feelings, some old tensions remained. President Evo Morales of Bolivia confronted Mr. Obama during a private session on Saturday with a charge that the United States had plotted to assassinate him. Mr. Obama responded on Sunday, saying, “I am absolutely opposed and condemn any efforts at violent overthrows of democratically elected governments.”

Some of that good will went too far for President Obama’s critics in Washington, where seemingly friendly images of him with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Mr. Obama’s overtures to Cuba drew criticism from Republican lawmakers.

Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq on Wednesday and Thursday, Turkish officials say. The raids came hours after the deaths of 10 Turkish soldiers in two separate attacks that were blamed on the rebels, the deadliest in months.

Air force planes bombed targets in the Iraqi border regions of Zap and Avasin-Basyan in the overnight raids.

On Wednesday, a powerful bomb blast killed nine soldiers in Diyarbakir in south-eastern Turkey. Suspected rebels also shot dead a soldier near the town of Semdinli, close to the border with Iraq.

The Chinese government is for the first time considering setting targets for carbon emissions, a significant development that could help negotiations on a Kyoto successor treaty at Copenhagen later this year

Su Wei, a leading figure in China's climate change negotiating team, said that officials were considering introducing a national target that would limit emissions relative to economic growth in the country's next five-year plan from 2011.

"It is an option. We can very easily translate our [existing] energy reduction targets to carbon dioxide limitation" said Su. "China hasn't reached the stage where we can reduce overall emissions, but we can reduce energy intensity and carbon intensity."

Sudan's government has agreed to allow some aid back into Darfur following its expulsion of humanitarian groups, US Senator John Kerry has said.

Sudan expelled the aid groups after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's president.

A Sudanese official indicated that the expelled groups would not be allowed to return to Darfur.

US President Barack Obama says CIA agents who used harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects during the Bush era will not be prosecuted.

Mr Obama banned the use of methods such as sleep deprivation and simulated drowning in his first week in office. He has now released four memos detailing techniques the CIA was able to use under the Bush administration.

Amnesty International said the Department of Justice appeared to be offering a "get-out-of-jail-free card" to individuals who were involved in acts of torture.

Trapped inside a tiny coastal strip no larger than 20 sq km, the last fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are almost out of time. Since the start of the year, the Sri Lankan military has stepped up its campaign. Outgunned, they have fallen back to an area designated a "no-fire zone", where civilians were told to gather to escape the fighting. In the past week, more than 500 rebel fighters were reported killed.

Alongside the LTTE fighters are tens of thousands of civilians, unwilling or unable to leave. The Sri Lankan government says they are being used as human shields, and independent humanitarian workers say there is no doubt that many who tried to escape have been shot by the Tigers. One UN worker described how a five-year-old boy was shot in the head as he tried to flee

The military says that, even when surrounded, many Tigers refused to surrender. Asked to explain how more than 500 Tigers had been killed in the most recent fighting, against an official military death toll of just 11, Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the military spokesman, said the rebels had been cut off and were unable to get fresh supplies: "They were pretty much out of ammunition, but they were determined to fight to the end. It was hand-to-hand fighting."

The murders of Ivo Pukanic and Ivana Hodak, together with a spate of attacks on journalists and businessmen, have confirmed a belief in the minds of many Croats that their country is in the grip of powerful mafia whose roots lie in the international embargo against Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Robbed of trade revenue and legitimate supplies of weapons, the constituent republics, including Croatia, turned to smuggling. Those criminals of yesteryear became the powerful businessmen of today.

In Vukovar I met respected journalist Goran Flauder, who has written investigative articles about some these men - and been physically attacked six times. "We like to say that where Italy is a state with a mafia, Croatia is a mafia with a state," he says.

For two hours, the meeting unfolded, laying bare the torments facing any Afghan Pashtuns who might be contemplating defying the Taliban — and the extraordinary difficulties facing American officers as they try to reverse the course of the war.

The meeting in Maidan Shahr, Wardak Province’s capital, tucked into the mountains about 30 miles southwest of Kabul, concerned one of the most unorthodox projects the Americans have undertaken here since the war began in 2001: to arm, with minimal training, groups of Afghan men to guard their own neighborhoods.

The military is borrowing a page from a similar program that helped bring about the recent calm to Iraq, where the Americans signed up more than 100,000 Iraqis, most of them Sunnis and many of them insurgents, to keep the peace.

Is that what former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said to you when you met with him here in Tehran in February? Ahmadinejad: Yes, he said it, as well.

We now hope to see concrete steps. This is good for everyone, but it is especially beneficial to the United States because the American position in the world is not exactly a good one. No one places any trust in the words of the Americans.

During my more than three years in office, I have visited more than 60 countries, where I was received with great affection by both the people on the street and those in the government. We have the support of 118 countries in the Non-Aligned Movement

I am quite aware that a distinction must be drawn between the American government and the American people. We do not hold Americans accountable for the faulty decisions of the Bush administration. They want to live in peace, like we all do.

The new US president, Barack Obama, directed a video address to the Iranian nation three weeks ago, during the Iranian New Year festival. Did you watch the speech? Ahmadinejad: Yes. Great things are happening in the United States. I believe that the Americans are in the process of initiating important developments.

We support talks on the basis of fairness and respect. That has always been our position. We are waiting for Obama to announce his plans, so that we can analyze them.

Thousands of opposition supporters in Georgia have begun a fifth day of protests, calling on President Mikhail Saakashvili to step down. The demonstrators gathered outside the parliament in Tbilisi, before marching on to the presidential palace, where they plan to hold an ongoing protest. Correspondents say turnout is falling and the opposition seems increasingly unsure of how to continue its campaign.

Mr Saakashvili says Russian oligarchs are financing the Georgian opposition.

After a brief pause on Sunday, more than 20,000 opposition supporters returned to the Georgian parliament building for a fifth day, chanting "Misha, Go!"

Ahmadinejad's program includes a visit to Isfahan's nuclear facilities on the outskirts of the city, where scientists are working on uranium enrichment. This is one of the mysterious factories the world fears, because it believes that the Iranians are building a nuclear bomb there.

This is the Iranian theocracy that sends shivers down the world's collective spine. For many, Iran is a nightmarish country, a combination of high-tech weapons and a religious ideology based on 1,400-year-old martyr legends that focuses on suffering. It is an isolated and unpredictable country, a wounded civilization whose leaders are taking their revenge on the West by striving to develop nuclear weapons and financing radical Islamists from Hamas to Hezbollah.

The Iranian president is currently under more pressure than usual. He is being asked to venture into new territory and respond to America's offer to relax tensions. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, threatened Tehran with "regime change" of the sort he announced and implemented in neighboring Iraq. Bush refused to so much as negotiate over the Iranian nuclear program and, with the arrogance of a superpower, helped unify the Iranian public against the "USA, the Great Satan." It was Bush who ensured that the relatively unpopular regime of mullahs, despite its mishandling of the economy, could stabilize itself.

Iran said it would review an offer of talks on its nuclear program with the United States and five other world powers, even as it prepared to declare new progress in its disputed atom activity on Thursday.

The United States, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain said on Wednesday they would ask European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana to invite Tehran to a meeting to find "a diplomatic solution to this critical issue." "We will review it and then decide about it," Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a senior adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told Reuters.

Underlining Tehran's determination to press ahead with its nuclear program, Ahmadinejad was expected to announce later on Thursday in the central city of Isfahan that Iran has mastered the final stage of atom fuel production.

the United States and its allies have had serious disagreements over North Korea. Japan is prepared to obstruct negotiations until Pyongyang comes clean on the handful of Japanese kidnapped by the North some 30 years ago. The Chinese have wanted to moderate and ultimately change North Korea through reform and sizable economic support, but have little to show for it. Many of the cognoscenti see China as the ultimate arbiter compelling North Korean cooperation. That, of course, has not happened. China has its own interest -- keeping North Korea afloat -- and that's not likely to change. The U.S. and Chinese economies are now so enmeshed that U.S. leverage on China is very limited. South Korea's "sunshine policy," which provided large-scale aid in hopes of ultimately seducing North Korea, was despised by the Bush administration. (Ironically, a new South Korean government abandoned the policy just as the United States was softening its approach to the North.)

The U.S. administration seems content to resume six-party talks where they left off: completing the "phase two" agreement, exchanging fuel oil for disablement of the North's plutonium facilities, and an agreement on verification, the sticking point precipitating the breakdown of negotiations. Preventing North Korea from producing more fissile material makes sense. From there, the going gets increasingly tough.

The weight of evidence suggests that North Korea will be unwilling to give up its nuclear weapons for a long time, if ever. The apparent North Korean interest in trading the dismantling of its plutonium facilities for light water reactors will not likely go down well in Washington. It is not much of a deal.

A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police.

The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.

The protesters created their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track.

Barack Obama wrapped up a landmark eight-day swing through Europe with a surprise visit to Iraq today - his first as president - and told US troops that Iraqis now needed "to take responsibility for their own country".

"You have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country," he said. "It is time for us to transition to the Iraqis. They need to take responsibility for their country."

"I have a responsibility to make sure that as we bring troops out, that we do so in a careful enough way that we don't see a complete collapse into violence," he said. "So some people might say, wait, I thought you were opposed to the war, why don't you just get them all out right away? Well, just because I was opposed at the outset it doesn't mean that I don't have now responsibilities to make sure that we do things in a responsible fashion."

Thailand's prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, rejected calls for his resignation as tens of thousands of protesters marched today in Bangkok, posing the biggest challenge to his government amid fears of violence.

Dressed in red, the massive crowd marched through Bankok's historic northern district, overtaking main boulevards and waving pictures of their leader-in-exile, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 coup after six years as prime minister.

The protesters say Abhisit, who was appointed by parliament in December, took power illegitimately and should step aside so parliament can be dissolved ahead of fresh elections.

The Taepodong-2 rocket flew twice as far as any previous North Korean missile.

Although Obama described the action as a "provocation", the US and Japan have so far failed to win support from China and Russia for a statement condemning Pyongyang and tightening existing sanctions.

The Japanese foreign minister, Hirofumi Nakasone, today admitted there were divisions in the security council."China and Russia share the concern that this is a threat to the region, but they appear reserved and cautious as of now," he told reporters in Tokyo.

En route to Ankara, Mr Obama said he supported the country's efforts to join the European Union. He said Turkey's accession would send an important signal to the Muslim world and firmly anchor it in Europe.

Before travelling to Turkey, Mr Obama participated in a Nato gathering in France, where he helped to overcome Turkey's objection to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the alliance's next leader.

Turkey had misgivings about Mr Rasmussen over his refusal to apologise for the "cartoons controversy", in which a Danish newspaper published illustrations that inflamed passions in much of the Muslim world. But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said late Sunday that Mr Obama's support had helped to resolve concerns. "He put forth a lot of positive energy," Mr Erdogan said. "We responded positively to this. We hope that the promises made are kept."