TEHRAN (AFP) -- UN nuclear experts are to inspect Iran's Gachin uranium mine later this month for the first time in almost nine years, its Atomic Energy Organisation said on Friday."The inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency will travel to Tehran on January 29 to visit Gachin mine," AEO spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi told Iran's official IRNA news agency.Iran agreed a framework deal with the UN nuclear watchdog in November that includes six steps Tehran must carry out by February 1

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama on Friday will call for ending the government's control of phone data from millions of Americans, a senior administration official said. The move marks a significant change to the National Security Agency's controversial bulk phone record collection program.Obama will announce the move in a highly anticipated speech at the Justice Department. However, the official said Obama will not recommend who should control the phone data and will instead call on th

LONDON (AFP) -- Britain's Prince Harry is to quit flying army Apache helicopters and take up a desk job organising commemorative military events, Kensington Palace said Friday.Captain Wales, as he is known in the military, served in Afghanistan as an Apache co-pilot gunner during his three years with the Army Air Corps.Kensington Palace said in a statement that 29-year-old Harry "has completed his attachment to 3 Regiment Army Air Corps and will now take up a Staff Officer role"."His responsibil

KIEV (AFP) -- The European Union and the United States expressed concern after the Ukrainian parliament passed laws to curb the right to protest, a move the opposition called a power grab.Western rights groups meanwhile denounced the bills passed on Thursday as an attempt by President Viktor Yanukovych to impose a "dictatorship" and called on him to veto the legislation.The opposition has staged nearly nearly two months of protests in a central Kiev square in response to Yanukovych's ditching a

HARRAN REFUGEE CAMP, Turkey (AFP) -- UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres said Friday it was vital that peace talks next week on the Syrian civil war find a "political solution" to the conflict.And he issued a fresh appeal for the world to help ease the massive burden on countries which have taken in millions of Syrian refugees."I am humble enough to recognise that there is no humanitarian solution for this problem. The solution is political," he told a meeting in Turkey of regional refugee-hosting

The young dentist was uncuffed and led to his seat in the courtroom. A few rows back, his mother watched motionlessly, her hands gently clasped together as if in prayer.Jeon Seong-Jin is being punished for a crime that is not a crime at all in most of the world. A Jehovah's Witness, he has refused to become a soldier in South Korea, where all able-bodied male citizens are required to serve about 21 months in the army.More than 660 conscientious objectors have been jailed each year in South Korea

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands (AP) -- Let the robot race begin.Expectations are high for RoboEarth, a new European-funded system to speed the development of human-serving robots. Scientists from five major European technical universities have gathered in the Netherlands this week for its launch and to demonstrate possible applications.The first: the deceptively simple task of delivering a glass of milk to a patient in a mock-up hospital room.The system is sometimes billed as a kind of Wikipedia for rob

JERUSALEM (AP) -- An Israeli draft law that would criminalize the use of the word Nazi in most cases has sparked a debate on freedom of speech in a state that was founded out of the ashes of the Holocaust.Seven decades later, memories of the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II permeate virtually every aspect of life in Israel. Public figures and interest groups frequently invoke the World War II genocide to score political points, and the word and Nazi symbols have slipped into

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After last fall's tumultuous, bitterly partisan debt ceiling and government shutdown battles, a sense of fiscal fatigue seems to be setting in among many U.S. policymakers as President Barack Obama prepares for his fifth State of the Union address later this month.A declining U.S. budget deficit, still-accommodative Federal Reserve and a small-bore budget deal negotiated last month _ given final approval Thursday in Congress _ are helping to temper partisan rhetoric in the sho

BEIJING (AP) -- The number of online microblog users in China dropped by more than 27.8 million last year, marking the first major decline in popularity of a social media genre that has offered a way to share unfiltered information in a country with strict controls.The drop comes amid a crackdown on microblogs deemed sensitive by government authorities and new controls on what can be posted and reposted, and reflects an overall decline in use of traditional social media in China that once had ex

BEIJING (AFP) - China will next week hold the trial of Xu Zhiyong, a long-time campaigner for legal-reform, prosecuted as part of what is seen as a government-led crackdown on dissent, his lawyer said Friday.The announcement came as the European Union's outgoing ambassador to China criticised growing curbs on human rights in the country, raising several individual cases including Xu's and a Uighur academic who was detained this week.Xu -- one of more than two dozen members of the loosely-connect

JODA, Sudan (AFP) -- Some walked, others were luckier and hitched a ride, but all ended up in the open at a Sudanese border checkpoint, waiting to cross and leave South Sudan's war behind.Hundreds of crying children and exhausted adults have converged on the border post at Joda, where Sudan's White Nile state meets the South's Upper Nile, which saw heavy fighting this week.They are among an estimated 10,000 who have fled north to Sudan in an exodus that the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) says has see

JAKARTA (AFP) -- Indonesia on Friday demanded Australia suspend its military-led operation to halt the flow of asylum-seekers in a furious response after Canberra apologised for intrusions by its navy into Indonesian waters.Jakarta also pledged to step up navy patrols in its southern maritime borders, saying it "deplores and rejects the violation of its sovereignty" caused by the Australian incursions.It came after Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison expressed regret after revealing t

JUBA (AFP) -- Battles raged Friday in South Sudan, as the army said it had lost contact with forces in the key oil-town of Malakal, which both rebels and the government claim to control.The United Nations has accused both sides of carrying out atrocities in the conflict that started on December 15 when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup.The UN's Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, Ivan Simonovic, who visited South Sudan recently to prepare a r

JERUSALEM (AFP) -- Israel called in European ambassadors in a tit-for-tat move Friday after four EU states lodged formal protests against the rightwing government's drive to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the European Union of a "hypocritical" attitude toward the Middle East process, saying it should be more concerned by Palestinian militancy than Israeli housing construction.The new spat with Europe follows a furious public row with key al