Afghanistan and the United States reached a deal to curb night raids on Afghan homes, giving Kabul a veto over the operations despised by most local people and clearing the way for a wider pact securing a US presence.
Mali's President Amadou Toumani Toure resigned on Sunday, paving the way for the soldiers who ousted him in a coup to stick by a deal to restore civilian rule and hand power to the president of the National Assembly.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right coalition has inched ahead of the main opposition parties for the first time in two years, a poll showed - thanks to a surge in support for the maverick Pirate Party at the expense of the Social Democrats.
A bid for power by Hosni Mubarak's former intelligence chief is an insult to Egypt's revolution that, if successful, would trigger a second nationwide revolt, the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate for Egypt's presidency said.
North Korea, pressing ahead with a rocket launch in defiance of a UN resolution, is also preparing a third nuclear weapons test, South Korean news reports said, a move bound to scare neighbours and infuriate the West.
Syria demanded written guarantees that insurgents will stop fighting before it pulls back troops under the terms of a peace plan, casting additional doubt over a truce due to start this week.
The US and its allies are pressing for an end to Iran's high-level uranium enrichment and the closure of a facility built deep under a mountain as talks on Tehran's nuclear standoff with the West resume this week.
Descendants of some of the 1,500 people killed when the Titanic sank a century ago were among the passengers on a cruise ship that set off from Britain on Sunday to retrace the route of the liner's ill-fated voyage.
The activist hacker group Anonymous plans to launch further attacks on Chinese government websites in a bid to uncover corruption and lobby for human rights, a member of the group said.
Iran has no interest in reviving a failed nuclear fuel swap deal with Western powers, but might scale back production of higher-grade enriched uranium once it has the material it needs, the head of the country's atomic energy organisation said.