Vast sections of Russia were under a state of emergency Friday as more than 10,000 firefighters fought to save villages and forests from being reduced to ash and ember during the country's hottest summer on record.

Liberia's government, still recovering from a 14-year civil war and previous decades of poverty and illiteracy, said Friday it will now require all children to get birth certificates, a document most of them lack.

Cambodia declared victory Friday in a diplomatic standoff with Thailand after the U.N. cultural agency agreed to consider its plan for managing a temple that is on land claimed by both countries.

Iraqi police say a roadside bomb north of Baghdad has killed five members of a family, including a 4-year-old girl.

Young and poor, the Vietnamese woman jumped at the chance to marry a South Korean introduced to her through a matchmaking agency.

Boats and helicopters struggled to reach hundreds of thousands of villagers cut off by floods in northwest Pakistan on Friday as the government said 430 people had been killed in the deadliest such disaster to hit the region since 1929.

The suspected remains of a 57-year-old Northern Ireland man who was abducted by the Irish Republican Army in 1981 have been unearthed in a bog in Ireland.

A minority Islamic sect told followers Friday to prepare for war after rock-throwing mobs attacked one of their mosques in central Indonesia, calling its members heretics.

Paramilitary soldiers fired on thousands of demonstrators in Indian Kashmir on Friday, killing three men and wounding at least 80 others as protests against Indian rule spread across the disputed region.

A Ugandan court has charged three men with terrorism and murder related to July 11 twin blasts that killed 76 people in the capital.

Three more U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan, bringing the U.S. death toll for July to at least 66 and making it the deadliest month for American forces in the nearly 9-year-war.

Two men who work for the U.S. Embassy in Paris underwent medical tests after handling a suspicious letter Friday, the embassy said, and Paris police said it appeared they had been exposed to tear gas fumes.

A draft constitution that Kenya votes on next week guarantees women the same rights as men _ unless a judge in a Muslim family court decrees otherwise.

After a 27-year courtship, two men on Friday became the first gay couple to wed under Argentina's historic same-sex marriage law _ the first of its kind for a Latin American nation.

US military: 3 more American troops killed in Afghanistan, raising monthly toll to record 66.

The leaders of Syria and Saudi Arabia launched an unprecedented effort Friday to defuse fears of violence over upcoming indictments in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

NATO announced Friday that six more U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for July to at least 66 and surpassing the previous month's record as the deadliest for American forces in the nearly 9-year-old war.

A U.S. senator wants to send investigators to Britain to question key witnesses on the release of the Lockerbie bomber.

Forest fires raged across Russia on Friday, destroying villages, surrounding one southern city and killing at least 25 people, including three firefighters. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin consoled survivors at one smoldering village and urged officials to redouble their efforts against the blazes.

President Nicolas Sarkozy says he wants to revoke the French citizenship of immigrants who put police officers' lives in danger.