BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. troops will on Sept. 1 hand over control of Iraq’s Anbar province, once the heart of a bloody Sunni Arab insurgency, reflecting a dramatic drop in violence across the country, an Iraqi official said on Thursday.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has reshuffled and replaced the head of a negotiating team seeking to finalize an agreement on the future presence of U.S. troops here, a senior Iraqi politician said on Thursday.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia successfully tested a long-range Topol missile designed to avoid detection by anti-missile defence systems from its Plesetsk launch site, a Russian military spokesman said on Thursday.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr extended indefinitely a ceasefire for his Mehdi militia on Thursday and ordered his followers to protest peacefully against the U.S. occupation.

TBILISI (Reuters) – Georgians flocked to church on Thursday to pray for their country, reeling from military defeat by Russia, and their Orthodox Patriarch asked God to give them back two breakaway provinces backed by Moscow.

KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan and international forces killed or wounded more than 30 militants in fighting in the south and southeast of the country, the Defense Ministry and the U.S. military said on Thursday.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Thousands of lawyers blocked roads across Pakistan on Thursday to press the government to reinstate judges purged by former president Pervez Musharraf, as militants attacked police in the northwest, killing 11 people.

GAZA (Reuters) – Israel on Thursday reopened its border crossings with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, two days after they were shut in response to rocket attacks.

LONDON (Reuters) – There is no question of launching “all-out war” against Russia, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on Thursday, while condemning Moscow’s “invasion” of Georgia.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A car bomb blew up as a Pakistani police bus traveled across a bridge in the country’s northwest on Thursday, killing 11 people, police said.