Sharky's Notebook

Thousands of people are expected to gather Saturday for a memorial service a week after a stampede at a German music festival left 21 people dead.

Fidel Castro on Friday accused the United States of "torturing" a Cuban agent imprisoned there, saying Cuba is being pressured to release its spies.

The Greek government ordered the country's armed forces to help deliver fuel as truck drivers voted to continue a contentious strike, state media reported.

The U.N. Security Council renews its mission in Darfur for a year, days after hearing that fighting has stepped up between rebels and the Sudanese government.

A blast at a tax office that left four dead and 19 injured in central China was a deliberate attack, state media reported Saturday.

In protest of what it calls a religion "of the devil," a non-denominational church in Gainesville, Florida, plans to host an "International Burn a Quran Day" on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

A 5.6-magnitude earthquake struck northeastern Iran on Friday, injuring 110 people, according to state-run media.

Israel launched an airstrike near a former presidential compound in Gaza City late Friday, according to a CNN stringer at the scene. The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately confirm the strike.

In a letter to supporters, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, writes of her fears of dying. Her stoning sentence was recently put on hold, but Iran's judiciary may release their final decision in the case next week.

A boy sent back to Moscow by his adoptive mother in the United States is in an orphanage, an attorney for the group that arranged the adoption says.

Flooding caused by monsoon rain has killed more than 400 people across Pakistan, a provincial government official says.

President Barack Obama is calling for the immediate release of three American hikers seized by Iranian forces along the Iraqi border who will have been in custody for exactly a year on Saturday.

Incoming BP CEO Bob Dudley sought to reassure jittery Gulf of Mexico residents Friday that the massive British corporation will not abandon them once the ruptured well responsible for the oil disaster has been permanently sealed.

The deaths of six U.S. troops in the past two days has made July the deadliest month for American forces in Afghanistan since the war began almost nine years ago.

At least 25 people in Russia have died in wildfires amid soaring summer temperatures. President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday order the military to help tackle the fires.

Uganda has charged three people in connection with the bomb blasts that erupted in an Ethiopian restaurant and a rugby center in Kampala earlier this month, killing some 76 people, a government official said Friday.

A French woman who admitted to giving birth to and smothering eight babies over a 17-year period was secretive but always supportive of her family, two of her daughters said in a local newspaper report published Friday.

The leaders of Syria and Saudi Arabia arrived in Lebanon on Friday, a visit intended to ease a heatening political crisis in the religiously diverse and combustible nation.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday he was disappointed by criticism from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates over the release of about 75,000 pages of U.S. documents related to the war in Afghanistan.

An Army private suspected of leaking classified material, including videos and other documents, has been moved from Kuwait to a Marine Corps brig in Virginia.