AP - The plan was nothing if not audacious: A turncoat persuades rebels to bring together their most prized hostages and march them 90 miles through Colombia's wilderness. A month later, disguised commandos primed with acting lessons land in a helicopter and trick the rebels into handing them over.

AP - A meal was rice and beans. Bed was the ground under a patched plastic tarp. They bathed in rivers, and when they weren't chained by the neck to trees, they were forced on long marches to new hideouts under the jungle canopy.

AP - Iraq's prime minister plans trips to Europe and the Persian Gulf this month, apparently hoping improved security at home will pay dividends in greater international support — including from a country that did not back the U.S. invasion.

AP - A day after a Palestinian construction worker's deadly rampage in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Thursday called for reviving the practice of demolishing the homes of attackers' families, and his chief deputy proposed cutting some Arab neighborhoods off from the rest of the city.

AP - Some 200 opposition supporters crowded outside the U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe on Thursday, appealing for protection amid new reports of violence aimed at dissenters against the heavy-handed rule of President Robert Mugabe.

AP - An Iranian diplomat said Thursday that four Iranians who disappeared in Lebanon in 1982 are alive in Israel and called for their release.

AFP - The United States on Thursday pushed for a UN travel ban and an assets freeze on Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and 11 of his cronies in protest at last week's widely condemned, one-man presidential runoff vote.

AFP - A direct flight from China to Taiwan departed on Friday, Chinese state media said, in the first such service since 1949.

AP - Alexander Downer announced Thursday he is quitting Australian politics following a career as the country's longest-serving foreign minister and one of its highest-profile leaders of the past decade.