French President Nicolas Sarkozy made a surprise visit to Baghdad Tuesday on a trip seen as aimed at raising his country's stake in Iraqi reconstruction and easing frictions with Washington over the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. Sarkozy, the first French president to visit the country, met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki during the brief trip ahead of a tour of Gulf states. The French leader described his visit as a vanguard of French economic involvement in rebuilding Iraq and ...

Pedro Pablo slowly folds up his American flag blanket and stuffs it in his duffel bag. With it goes his American dream. "I left my family and lost four years with them. I will ask them to forgive me," he said. Pablo is an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who came to the United States to support his wife and five sons back home. When he arrived, construction jobs were plentiful. Over the last year, he says, he's worked three days. ...

Iran's president said Tuesday his country welcomes talks with the United States "in a fair atmosphere with mutual respect." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the remarks a day after President Barack Obama said the United States is looking for opportunities for "face to face" dialogue with Iran, even though he has "deep concerns" about Tehran's actions. "Right now, the world is entering the era of dialogue," Ahmadinejad told hundreds of thousands of people in a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the ...

Rihanna postponed a concert in Malaysia that was set for Friday night, according to the show's promoter, following reports that she was allegedly assaulted by boyfriend Chris Brown. Promoter Pineapple Concerts announced Tuesday that it was notified by Rihanna's agent at the William Morris Agency that she would not make the Malaysia date. "In light of recent events involving Rihanna, the artist management will confirm within two weeks from now on a replacement date to be mutually agreed by Pineapple ...

Through a smoky haze, flames continue to dance around the remains of a house, a shed and the blackened trunks of trees on remarkable video footage filmed moments after a firestorm swept through the rural Victorian town of Kinglake, Australia. Resident Brad Price is holding the camera, providing a slightly breathless commentary of the destruction of his home and town as smoke clogs his throat and blurs his vision. "Everything's gone. I'm over at Kylie's house which is next door. ...

The Red Cross plans to evacuate 400 sick and wounded civilians from a Sri Lankan beach, a spokeswoman said Tuesday. Most of the patients have been without proper medical care for a week, when fighting between government forces and Tamil rebels forced the closure of a hospital where they were being treated, said Sarasi Wijeratne, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Colombo. An ICRC-chartered ferry flying a Red Cross flag left the northern city ...

Parts of southeastern Australia turned to recovery Tuesday even as fires smoldered and sometimes raged across sections of the scarred landscape. Tent cities sprung up around Whittlesea, just north of Melbourne, as relief agencies pitched camps for those forced out of their homes. Weekend bushfires "completely wiped out" the towns of Marysville and Kinglake, officials said. More than 20 fires were burning Tuesday, according to the Country Fire Authority. Frustration also brewed as residents desperately wanted to return ...

President Obama appeared before a national audience Monday night to make the case for his economic stimulus plan, saying this is not your "run-of-the-mill recession." The president stressed the urgency of passing the roughly $838 billion measure, which his administration and Democratic leaders say will help pull the U.S. economy out of its current skid. "My bottom line is to make sure that we are saving or creating 4 million jobs, we are making sure that the financial system ...

Thousands of Liberians living in the United States face deportation March 31 when a federal immigration status created for humanitarian purposes expires. In the 1990s, a bloody civil war raged through the West African nation, killing 250,000 people and displacing more than a million, according to a U.N. report. The United States extended "temporary protection status" to all Liberians who could get to America, and 14,000 of them took advantage of that humanitarian offer. Temporary protection status is an immigration ...

A German court Monday refused to intervene in the case of Bishop Richard Williamson, who is facing prosecution for denying the Holocaust -- a crime in Germany. Williamson asked the court to order Swedish Public Television to restrict broadcast of an interview in which he doubts the existence of Nazi gas chambers and a systematic Nazi plan to annihilate European Jewry. Williamson sought the help of the court because Holocaust denial is punishable in Germany only if it is publicized ...