Dozens of supporters abandoned former Honduras president Manuel Zelaya to an increasingly isolated embassy in the country’s capital today as the stand-off over his return continued.

Ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was kept from landing at the country's main airport today because the runway was blocked by military vehicles and groups of soldiers, some of them clashing with a crowd of thousands outside.

A hearing on vote fraud charges will be delayed and continue in a new location in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa after part of the country’s supreme court caught fire yesterday amid gunfire and street fighting among supporters of the runner-up, officials said today.

SOMALIA’S powerful Islamists yesterday said they would not attend peace talks with the interim government until Ethiopian troops left their soil.

For days, Iraq was shaken by claims that Sunni militants had abducted as many as 100 Shiites from an area at the tip of Iraq’s Triangle of Death.

Iraq’s newly-elected parliament chose Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as its new interim president today, reaching out to the nation’s long-repressed Kurdish minority and taking one of the final steps toward forming Iraq’s first democratically elected government in 50 years.

SHOUTING from their seats, lawmakers failed to agree on a parliament speaker during their second-ever National Assembly meeting yesterday, as officials continued to haggle over the role of Sunni Arabs in the new government, a role officials hope will quell the Sunni-led insurgency.

Iraq’s interim president said that tens of thousands of people may have been unable to vote in the country’s historic weekend election because some polling places – including those in Sunni Arab areas – ran out of ballots.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday no support should be given to Georgia's restive regions, a day after Georgia accused Russia of meddling in its domestic affairs.