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BAGHDAD/BEIRUT - Iraq warned that Syria's civil war is tearing the Middle East apart and Lebanon's president urged his country's Hezbollah movement on Thursday to pull its fighters out of the conflict.
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DOHA - A fresh effort to end Afghanistan's 12-year-old war looked in trouble on Thursday after a diplomatic spat about the Taliban's new Qatar office delayed preliminary discussions between the United States and the Islamist insurgents.
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ISTANBUL/BRUSSELS - Turkey warned German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday not to play politics with its European Union ambitions, and said failure to open a new chapter in accession talks next week would be a major setback in Ankara's relations with the bloc.
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LONDON - More than a third of all women worldwide are victims of physical or sexual violence, posing a global health problem of epidemic proportions, a World Health Organization report said on Thursday.
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WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a law requiring non-profit organizations to adopt an anti-prostitution policy in order to obtain federal funding for HIV/AIDS programs abroad.
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CARACAS - Wearing sports gear in the national colors and sitting on a sofa in a modest family home, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro holds a microphone, chats with locals and expounds on the benefits of socialism.
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GENEVA - A United Nations human rights body accused Israeli forces on Thursday of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields.
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RAMALLAH - Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah has offered his resignation to President Mahmoud Abbas just two weeks after taking office, an official in his press office told Reuters on Thursday.
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CAIRO - An Egyptian court ordered the release of former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif on Thursday because of a limit on pre-trial detention in a corruption case for which he had been held since the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak.
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NEW DELHI - India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance programme that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said.
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