A Spanish judge would consider sending two Somali pirate suspects held in Madrid back to Africa, as demanded by pirates holding a Spanish fishing boat and its crew off the Somali coast, it was reported Friday.

A new international treaty to combat climate change will not be ready when 40 world leaders meet next month in Copenhagen but may be finished next year, a top United Nations official said Friday in Barcelona.

In a major speech on Afghanistan, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Friday that Britain "cannot, must not, and will not walk away" from its mission there.

A court sentenced four people to death in northern Tanzania for the killing of an albino man who was targeted for body parts believed to have special powers, authorities said Friday.

President Barack Obama urged Democrats in the House to pass a broad healthcare reform bill Saturday as they prepared for a close vote on the biggest changes in health policy in four decades.

An laid-off employee is under arrest after a man opened fire at an engineering consulting firm in Orlando, Fla., on Friday, killing one person and wounding five others, police said.

Guards at the United Nations whisked away a UN-accredited Canadian commentator this week after she denounced a controversial report that focuses heavily on alleged Israeli war crimes.

A videotape of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden released on Friday is the Pashto-language version of a tape released several months ago, said IntelCenter, a U.S.-based terrorism monitoring firm.

President Barack Obama Friday listed a range of fresh options being considered by the White House to spur growth after "sobering" news that unemployment spiked to a 26 1/2-year peak last month.

The death toll left by an army psychiatrist who went on a shooting rampage at a U.S. military base in Texas rose to 13 on Friday, U.S. media reported.

Somali pirates have threatened to kill three captive crew members from a Spanish fishing vessel if two suspected pirates being held in Spain are not freed, a senior officer aboard the vessel said on Friday.

U.S. government-to-government arms sales rose 4.7 per cent to a record $38.1 billion last year, and are expected to total almost as much in 2010, the Pentagon agency that administers the

The British military's climate change czar says he doesn't expect next month's UN talks in Copenhagen to produce a decisive breakthrough in the battle to reduce harmful greenhouse gases.

Democratic leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives scrambled on Friday to allay lingering concerns about a broad health care overhaul and said a landmark vote planned for Saturday could slip a day or more.

Ukraine could delay a January presidential election until May next year if the government fails to control an outbreak of H1N1 flu, a senior official wrote on the respected news Web site Ukrainska Pravda on Friday.

More than 25 NATO and Afghan troops were wounded during a search on Friday for two missing U.S. paratroopers in western Afghanistan, the NATO-led force said.

A photograph of accused John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, which for many years was thought by conspiracy theorists to be forged by authorities, is real, says an American computer scientist.

U.S. employers cut a deeper-than-expected 190,000 jobs in October, government data showed on Friday, driving the unemployment rate to 10.2 per cent, the highest in 26-1/2 years.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, winner of a fraud-tainted election, risks losing British and international support unless he acts decisively to fight corruption, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Friday.