UNITED NATIONS

Iran is getting a visit from the United Nations' nuclear agency on Sunday, a surprise development as Iran prepares for scheduled talks with Western powers next week.

Speaking from Damascus on Friday, a leader of the United Nations observer mission in Syria said the U.N. monitors' presence alone would not be enough to stop the ongoing violence there.

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki was in Khartoum on Friday to try and push Sudan and South Sudan back to the negotiation table.

Iran is threatening to seek legal action against Google for failing to use the term 'Persian Gulf' on its maps. The issue over name labels actually elicits strong nationalistic sentiments in the country.

China has been nudging North Korea to shelve the plans for a third nuclear test, though it remains unclear how North may react to the pressure, sources aware of the secretive discussions between the two nations have said.

Taylor, who was convicted in April of supporting rebels during Sierra Leone's bloody civil war, was speaking before the court for the last time before sentencing later this month.

More than four million people in South Sudan -- about half of the country's population -- face hunger and food shortages as clashes with Sudan along the border continue, according to the United Nations.

A report released Tuesday by the United Nations Development Program argues that Africa must increase its agricultural productivity in order to keep up with promising rates of economic growth.

Al-Nusra, a little-known Islamic opposition group fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has denied a video that appeared shortly after last Thursday's Damascus attack in which the group supposedly claimed responsibility was released by them.

Myanmar has promised to stop buying weapons from North Korea, ending 20 years of military cooperation and taking a further step toward reform.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for African rebel leaders Bosco Ntaganda and Sylvestre Mudacumura, who are allegedly responsible for crimes against humanity in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief inspector Hermann Nackaerts pressed Tehran to allow access to people, documents, information and sites, before two days of preliminary talks with Iran's envoy, Ali Asghar Soltanieh in Vienna began on Monday.

Swedish organization ADay.org asks people across the globe to pick up a camera on May 15, 2012 and participate in the world's largest and most comprehensive photographic documentation of a single day in human history.

The fighting, which first erupted on Saturday, is the worst violence in Lebanon since the uprising against Assad began over 14 months ago.

While Battleship's dialogue and character development and plot make very little sense, this 130-minute Hasbro commercial-slash-U.S. Navy recruiting ad does have a toehold in scientific fact.

State media said the Bashar al-Assad regime had called on the UN Security Council and Ban Ki-moon for assistance in tackling the escalating crimes committed by terrorists receiving help from abroad.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan attended the grand dinner hosted by Mukesh and Nita Ambani at their residence Antilia held in the honor of United Nations' Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.The party was also attended by Bollywood biggies like Aamir Khan, Farhan Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Karishma Kapoor, Javed Akhtar among others. What caught everyone's attention in the party was the supposed conversation between Ban and Aishwarya.

Speaking in Geneva on Tuesday, international envoy Kofi Annan said there is a profound concern that [Syria] could ... descend into full civil war.

The IAEA has posted no comment yet on the reported death.

How will the next Apple iPhone be named - New iPhone, iPhone 6 or iPhone 5? Nobody has enough clues to bet on any of them, until Apple makes an official announcement. But a recent complaint the Cupertino tech giant filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) hints that the company could be interested in the name iPhone 5.

Among the flurry of decrees Vladimir Putin issued after returning to the presidency for a historic third term were calls for faster privatization and government-sponsored boost in capital investment and closer ties with the US, based on equality, non-interference in internal affairs and respect for one another's interests.