By Amena Bakr DOHA (Reuters) - A fresh effort to end Afghanistan's 12-year-old war looked in disarray on Thursday after a diplomatic spat about the Taliban's new Qatar office delayed preliminary discussions between the United States and the Islamist insurgents. Talks between U.S. officials and representatives of the Taliban had been set for Thursday in Qatar but Afghan government anger at the fanfare surrounding the opening of a Taliban office in the Gulf state threw preparations into confusion. ...

By Frank Jack Daniel and Mehreen Zahra-Malik ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's powerful military has played a central role in convincing Afghanistan's Taliban rebels to hold talks with the United States, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, a shift from widely held views in Washington that it was obstructing peace in the region. U.S. and Taliban officials were due to meet in Doha, the capital of Qatar, in the next few days, raising hopes for negotiated peace after 12 years of war between American-led forces and the Islamist insurgents. ...

BEIRUT (Reuters) - President Michel Suleiman has called on the Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim Hezbollah movement to pull its guerrillas out of Syria, saying any further involvement in its neighbor's civil war would fuel instability in Lebanon. Hezbollah militants spearheaded the recapture of the strategic border town of Qusair two weeks ago by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which now appear to be preparing for an offensive in the northern city of Aleppo. ...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The war crimes trial of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta will begin on November 12, judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled on Thursday, accepting his lawyers' request for more time to prepare his defense. Deputy President William Ruto and Kenyatta were elected on a joint ticket in March. Both are accused of orchestrating violence after the previous election, five years ago, in which 1,200 people died. Kenyatta and Ruto deny the charges. (Reporting by Gilbert Kreijger; Editing by Jon Boyle)

By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - 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. Palestinian children in the Gaza and the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, are routinely denied registration of their birth and access to health care, decent schools and clean water, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said. ...

By Abdi Sheikh MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somalia's Islamist al Shabaab rebel group threatened to keep attacking "disbelievers" without respite, a day after launching a deadly assault against the United Nations in the capital Mogadishu. Security was tight on Thursday as Somali army pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns blocked the main road linking the city center with the fortified airport and nearby U.N. base that was targeted. A water canon truck blasted away bloodstains on the street. ...

ROME (AP) — Organizers of the Taormina Film Festival scrambled Thursday to put together a last-minute tribute to U.S. actor James Gandolfini, after he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest while in Italy to attend the festival's closing ceremony and receive an honor from the Sicilian resort city.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Iraqi electoral official was killed in a roadside bombing on Thursday, police said, as two Sunni Muslim-dominated provinces went to the polls under tight security. Most Iraqis voted for provincial councils in April but the Shi'ite Muslim-led government postponed elections in Anbar and Nineveh, citing security concerns after months of protests by the country's Sunni minority. The decision to delay voting in those governorates was criticized by the United States, which said this would compound a sense of Sunni marginalization that has fuelled a wave of violent unrest. ...

By Tom Perry CAIRO (Reuters) - An Egyptian court ordered the release of former prime minister Ahmed Nazif on Thursday, because of a limit on pretrial detention in a corruption case for which he had been held since the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. The court accepted an appeal lodged by Nazif, who was prime minister from 2004 until Mubarak replaced him during the uprising in January 2011. He still faces retrial in the case. A lawyer for Nazif, Mohamed Salah al-Buheiri, said he expected his client to leave prison by Saturday at the latest after two years and two months in detention. ...

ROME (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Thursday that financial speculation and corruption were keeping millions of people in hunger and the financial crisis could not be used as an alibi for failing to help the poor. The speech was the latest in a series of criticisms by the Argentinian pontiff, the first Latin American pope, of what he has called "the dictatorship of the economy" and the spread of consumerist values. "It is a well-known fact that current levels of production are sufficient, yet millions of people are still suffering and dying of starvation. ...

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Norway's Parliament has opened up a new area on the fringe of the Arctic Ocean to offshore oil drilling despite protests from opponents who fear catastrophic oil spills in the remote and icy region.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — The Afghan Taliban are ready to free a U.S. soldier held captive since 2009 in exchange for five of their senior operatives imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay as a conciliatory gesture, a senior spokesman for the group said Thursday.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Sefa Riano didn't try to hide his plans or his beliefs. A Facebook page that police traced to him is plastered with photos of bearded men in camouflage uniforms holding rifles and banners hailing "The Spirit of Jihad."

BEIJING (AP) — Astronauts struck floating martial arts poses, twirled gyroscopes and manipulated wobbling globes of water during a lecture Thursday from China's orbiting space station that's part of efforts to popularize the space program among young people.

By Roberta Rampton and Stephen Brown BERLIN (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama used a speech in Berlin on Wednesday to call on Russia to revive the push for a world without nuclear weapons, offering to cut deployed nuclear arsenals by a third, but Moscow immediately poured scorn on his proposal. Speaking in Berlin where U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan gave rousing Cold-War speeches, Obama urged Russia to help build on the "New START" treaty that requires Moscow and Washington to cut stockpiles of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,550 each by 2018. ...

LONDON (AP) — Markets were roiled Thursday by a suggestion from U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke that the central bank may be done with its monetary stimulus next year. While stocks and commodities took a pounding on the news, the dollar surged.

VERACRUZ, Mexico (AP) — Tropical Storm Barry bore down on Mexico's Gulf Coast early Thursday as civil defense workers readied emergency shelters and forecasters warned of the possibility of deadly flash floods and mudslides.

BEIRUT (AP) — The Saudi envoy to Lebanon says the kingdom will deport Lebanese citizens who support the militant Hezbollah group because of its role in the Syrian civil war.

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) — Iraqis in two Sunni-dominated provinces voted Thursday in provincial elections marked by tight security measures that left streets in former insurgent strongholds largely deserted.

BEIJING (AP) — Call me a lecher but don't call me a crook, an ex-city official at the heart of a sex tape scandal has said in his unusually spirited courtroom defense against corruption charges.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Insurance claims for flood damage in Germany may be as much as 6 billion euros ($8 billion), catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide said on Thursday, after the worst flooding in a decade. Heavy rainfall in late May and early June drenched Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic in particular, causing widespread flooding, and also affected Switzerland, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, forcing thousands of people to leave their homes. "Floodwaters hit Germany hardest," Yorn Tatge, managing director of Air Worldwide in Germany, said in a statement. ...

By Ivan Castro and Lomi Kriel MANAGUA/PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - For centuries since the colonization of the New World, entrepreneurs have dreamed of building a canal spanning Nicaragua to make it easier to tap Asia's riches. Sixteenth century Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes yearned to cleave the isthmus, and ever since, French, American and Dutch financiers have all made abortive, Quixotic attempts to bisect the Central American country's volcano-studded terrain. Now it's the turn of the Chinese. And skepticism is as strong as ever. ...