AP - Pro-government crowds swarmed outside the battered home of a key Iranian opposition leader Friday after militiamen attacked with firebombs and beat a bodyguard unconscious in a brazen message of intimidation and pinpoint pressure on dissent.

AP - North Korea is preparing its largest political meeting in 30 years, and leader Kim Jong Il is expected to appoint a son to a key Workers Party position in what would be the strongest sign yet of a succession movement in the secretive communist country.

AP - Mozambique's economy has lost more than $3 million because of deadly riots over the rising prices of food and other goods, the government said Friday, as state media reported new protests in two other towns.

AP - A suicide bombing claimed by the Pakistani Taliban killed at least 43 Shiite Muslims at a procession in southwest Pakistan on Friday. The assault sharply drove up the toll of sectarian assaults in a country battered by massive flooding.

AP - A powerful 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck much of New Zealand's South Island early Saturday. No tsunami alert was issued and there were no reports of injuries, but looters broke into some damaged shops in Christchurch, police said.

AP - From the mixture of hurt, anger and embarrassment on his face, Gordon seems like one of the last people who would want to open his life to cameras for a reality television show.

AP - Yoko Ono says John Lennon is still helping her in her endeavours as an artist and peace activist as she pays tribute to her late husband before what would have been his 70th birthday.

AP - Sofia Coppola gives audiences an insider's look into two worlds she knows intimately in her latest film: hotels and Hollywood.

Lindsay Lohan may have completed her jail time and latest stint in rehab, but Jerry Lewis thinks the Mean Girls star is in need of a more corporal form of punishment.

"I'd smack her in the mouth if I saw her," Lewis said in a interview with Inside Edition. "I would smack her in the mouth and be arrested for...

AP - Sara Paretsky's latest installment in her series about feisty, female private detective V.I. Warshawski opens with the heroine outside a Chicago nightclub, the bloody body of a woman who was just shot to death in her arms.

AP - John Woo built his reputation with stylish Hong Kong action thrillers, then moved to Hollywood where he directed such big-budget blockbusters as "Mission Impossible II."