NEW YORK/PARIS - IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged on Sunday with trying to rape a New York hotel maid in a scandal that appeared to wreck his hopes of becoming France's next president.
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JERUSALEM - Israeli troops shot Palestinian protesters who surged towards its frontiers with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza on Sunday, killing at least 13 people on the day Palestinians mourn the establishment of Israel in 1948.
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WASHINGTON - U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on Sunday said he is ready to cut a deal on raising the debt limit if only President Barack Obama would get serious about spending cuts.
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ISLAMABAD - U.S. Senator John Kerry met Pakistan's powerful army chief on Sunday to press for answers on Osama bin Laden, but he will also be keen to ensure Pakistani anger over the U.S. raid does not subvert security cooperation.
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SANAA - The Yemeni father of Osama bin Laden's youngest wife, wounded in a U.S. raid that killed the al Qaeda leader, said he initially rebuffed a matchmaker's proposal that his daughter marry bin Laden, before blessing their union.
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TRIPOLI - NATO must broaden the range of targets it is bombing in Libya or risk failing to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power, Britain's most senior military officer was quoted as saying on Sunday.
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CAIRO - Arab states picked Egypt's foreign minister on Sunday to lead the Arab League during a period of unprecedented turmoil in the region and after last minute diplomacy left only one candidate in the race.
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AMMAN - At least seven Syrian civilians were killed on Sunday when Syrian troops shelled the town of Tel Kelakh near the border with Lebanon to quell a pro-democracy uprising, an activists' protest group said.
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ROME - Italians voted on Sunday in local elections that will show whether a sex scandal, three corruption trials and a stagnating economy have seriously damaged Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi two years before the end of his term.
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TOKYO - Japanese officials are readying a new approach to stabilising a reactor at a nuclear plant crippled by an earthquake and tsunami after discovering a leak from the containment vessel of enough radioactive water to fill an Olympic swimming pool.
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LIMA - Right-wing lawmaker Keiko Fujimori's lead over leftist Ollanta Humala appears to be growing ahead of Peru's June 5 presidential run-off, polls by survey firms Ipsos and CPI showed on Sunday.
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CAPE CANAVERAL - Good weather looks 70 percent likely for Monday's scheduled launch of Endeavour, the next-to-last U.S. space shuttle mission as NASA develops a new generation of craft for longer voyages.
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