NATO air-strikes killed 12 civilian road workers in eastern Afghanistan, a provincial governor said on Wednesday, an incident bound to fuel Afghan resentment against the presence of international forces.

Serbs and Kosovo Albanians were unable to agree on Wednesday on the future of the breakaway province of Kosovo, EU envoy Wolfgang Ischinger said.

General Pervez Musharraf finally quit as army chief on Wednesday, trading the post for a second five-year term as president and fulfilling a promise many Pakistanis doubted he would keep.

Official negligence contributed to the death toll in Afghanistan’s biggest suicide bombing, which killed 72 people, most of them schoolboys, this month, the interior minister said on Tuesday.

Nine people were killed when a suicide bomber posing as a shepherd attacked police north of Baghdad on Tuesday and at least six civilians died in a spate of shootings by U.S. soldiers, security officials said.

Six people were killed when a suicide bomber attacked provincial police headquarters in Baquba north of Baghdad on Tuesday, police said.

U.S. troops killed five Iraqi civilians, including a child, in two separate shootings in the past two days, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.On Monday, U.S. troops targeting al Qaeda fighters in Baiji, 180 km (110 miles)

Russia’s top election official appeared to rule out the possibility of President Vladimir Putin exploiting a legal loophole to run for a third term, a Moscow radio station reported.

US President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki agreed Monday to hold formal talks next year to decide the future of US forces in Iraq and other thorny issues, the White House said.

An Iraqi journalist said on Monday gunmen went on a killing spree in his Baghdad home, murdering seven children and four adult relatives, but Iraq’s interior ministry denied the attack took place.