Reuters World News Highlights 2200 GMT Feb 11
TOP STORIES
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VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict stunned the Roman Catholic Church including his closest advisers on Monday when he announced he would stand down in the first papal abdication in 700 years, saying he no longer had the mental and physical strength to run the Church through a period of major crisis.
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GAO, Mali - Malian troops hunted house-to-house in Gao on Monday for Islamist insurgents whose attack inside the northern town at the weekend showed the risk that French forces might become entangled in a messy guerrilla war.
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LONDON - The British government on Monday intensified its campaign to stop Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, publishing a legal opinion saying it would forfeit its membership of international bodies such as the European Union if it chose independence.
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WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats in Congress are bringing victims of gun violence to his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, providing faces and voices to the carnage that he wants to curb with new restrictions on firearms.
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WASHINGTON - Senate Democratic leaders moved ahead on Monday with plans for a vote on Chuck Hagel's confirmation as secretary of defense, clearing the way for him to become President Barack Obama's new Pentagon chief despite intense opposition from some Republicans.
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AMMAN/BEIRUT - Rebels have captured Syria's biggest hydro-electric dam and battled army tank units near the centre of Damascus, activists said as the opposition renewed an offer on Monday to negotiate the departure of President Bashar al-Assad.
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BUCHAREST - Romania's prime minister said on Monday any fraud over horsemeat sold as beef had not happened in his country and he was angered by suggestions it might have been.
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TUNIS - A party led by interim President Moncef Marzouki said on Monday it had "frozen" its withdrawal from Tunisia's coalition government while talks continue on a political crisis sharpened by the killing of an opposition politician.
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UNITED NATIONS - As the United States pushes for an end to the U.N. arms embargo on Somalia, U.N. monitors are reporting that Islamist militants in the Horn of Africa nation are receiving arms from distribution networks linked to Yemen and Iran, diplomats told Reuters.
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MOSCOW - Group of 20 policymakers have an ideal chance in Moscow this week to ponder whether monetary policy largesse will blunt their will to carry out the economic reforms needed to put global growth on a sustainable footing.
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ALLAHABAD, India - A stampede at a railway station in northern India killed at least 36 Hindu pilgrims on Sunday, the busiest day of the world's largest religious festival at which some 30 million had gathered to wash away their sins in the sacred Ganges river.
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MOSCOW - An underground methane gas explosion killed up to 18 miners at a coal pit in northern Russia on Monday and President Vladimir Putin dispatched his disasters minister to the scene to oversee rescue efforts.