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UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Violence has decreased and security has improved across most of Iraq in the past three months but much progress is needed on the political front, a top U.N. official said on Wednesday.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic demanded on Wednesday that former U.S. peace mediator Richard Holbrooke and ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright appear at the U.N. war crimes tribunal to back his claims of an immunity offer from the United States.

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia was under fire from the International Red Cross on Wednesday after the aid agency demanded the government clarify whether it had deliberately misused its emblem during a mission to free rebel hostages.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed on Wednesday to the release of 120 to 150 Palestinian prisoners later this month as a gesture to President Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian officials said.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and the United States called on Wednesday for a halt to violence in Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia where separatists made disputed claims of military success against Tbilisi's forces.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia buried Soviet-era dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn at a 16th-century monastery on Wednesday after a religious ceremony attended by President Dmitry Medvedev which bore all the hallmarks of a state funeral.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's prime minister will hold an emergency meeting with political leaders on Wednesday to defuse a land row over a Hindu shrine in Kashmir which has sparked some of the state's worst religious riots in two decades.

PARIS (Reuters) - France said on Wednesday Rwandan charges that senior French officials were involved in the African country's 1994 genocide were "unacceptable" but it still wanted to continue to improve ties with Kigali.

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia has stepped up its pursuit of fugitive Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic whose arrest is crucial to the country's European Union bid, a senior Serbian official said on Wednesday.

NOUAKCHOTT (Reuters) - The leaders of a coup in Mauritania may have won the support of many local politicians but they face a tide of international outrage for ousting the desert nation's first democratically elected president.

ABOARD AIRFORCE ONE (Reuters) - The White House said on Wednesday it believed Western powers had to take further "punitive" measures against Iran because Tehran gave no concrete reply to their demand that it freeze its nuclear activities.

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF and the opposition MDC on Wednesday called on their supporters to end political violence in the country, the most tangible sign of progress since power-sharing talks began two weeks ago.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's 4-month-old civilian government has suspended a decree issued last month to put the military's powerful and controversial spy agency under Interior Ministry control, according to an official statement.

KABUL (Reuters) - A senior Afghan intelligence official has accused a number of parliamentarians of supporting Taliban insurgents, Afghan newspapers said on Wednesday.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani army helicopter airlifted a frost-bitten Italian climber to the nearest hospital on Wednesday, a day after he was brought down to the K2 base camp following the worst-ever climbing disaster on the mountain.

HASHARON PRISON, Israel (Reuters) - Israel released five Palestinian prisoners on Wednesday as part of a swap deal with the Lebanese Hezbollah guerrilla group that brought the bodies of two Israeli soldiers home.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's North Africa wing said it was behind a deadly suicide bombing in Algeria on Sunday, according to a statement posted on the Internet on Wednesday.

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's best known opposition politician Anwar Ibrahim is to be charged with sodomy on Thursday, potentially derailing his return to parliament and his plans to push the government out of office.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf delayed a visit to China on Wednesday by a day, the foreign ministry said, as opponents in the coalition government consulted over his possible impeachment.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's top court ruled on Tuesday that dozens of politicians, among them leading opponents of President Hugo Chavez, will not be allowed to run in regional elections later this year.