President Mohammed Morsi on Thursday called parliamentary elections that will begin on April 27 and finish in late June, a four-stage vote that the Islamist leader hopes will conclude Egypt's turbulent transition to democracy.

U.S. President Barack Obama sent 40 additional soldiers to Niger to help with intelligence efforts as French and African troops battle an Islamist insurgency in neighboring Mali, the White House said in a letter to Congress Friday.

Malian troops were battling armed Islamists in the northern city of Gao on Thursday in clashes that left the main courthouse in flames, an AFP correspondent and a military source said.

A police detective, testifying at Oscar Pistorius' bail hearing Wednesday, said that police have not found anything inconsistent with how the star athlete described his shooting of his girlfriend — a killing that Pistorius says was accidental but which prosecutors call murder.

Oscar Pistorius fired into the door of a small bathroom where his girlfriend was cowering after a shouting match on Valentine's Day, hitting her three times, a South African prosecutor said Tuesday as he charged the sports icon with premeditated murder.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder discussed regional crime with Caribbean leaders on Monday during a summit in Haiti.

Mali's military has detained eight Arab men in Timbuktu, throwing them into a pickup truck and covering it with a tarp in a sweep that has raised fears of further reprisals against the region's Arab minority, whose members are accused of having supported the al-Qaida-linked groups which overran northern Mali last year.

South African police have found a bloodied cricket bat at the home of Oscar Pistorius, a local newspaper reported on Sunday, following the Valentine's Day killing of his model girlfriend.

Gunmen attacked a camp for a construction company in rural northern Nigeria, killing a guard and kidnapping seven foreign workers from Britain, Greece, Italy and Lebanon, authorities said Sunday, in the biggest kidnapping yet in a region under attack by Islamic extremists.

South African “'Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee who became one of the biggest names in world athletics, broke down in tears on Friday after being formally charged in a Pretoria court with the murder of his girlfriend.