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NOUAKCHOTT (Reuters) - Leaders of a military coup in Mauritania promised on Thursday to hold a "free and transparent" presidential election as soon as possible, defying foreign calls to reinstate the country's first freely elected president.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Hundreds of volunteers from Russia and Abkhazia headed for Georgia's breakaway province of South Ossetia on Friday to join separatists fighting Tbilisi forces, Interfax news agency reported.

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe said on Thursday power-sharing talks with the opposition MDC were going well, but dismissed media reports about a draft agreement as nonsense.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Roadside bomb incidents involving U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan hit their highest level in at least four years between April and June, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A mortar shell attack which injured three people in Istanbul on Thursday had targeted an army headquarters, broadcaster NTV reported security sources as saying.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's ruling coalition will move to impeach President Pervez Musharraf on charges of plunging the country into a political and economic crisis, party leaders said on Thursday.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Thursday that he had contacted the U.S. and Chinese presidents to discuss reviving the global trade talks, which collapsed last month.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - A top U.N. nuclear watchdog official began talks in Iran on Thursday aimed at improving cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency over Tehran's nuclear program.

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's leading opposition figure Anwar Ibrahim was charged with sodomy and granted bail by a court on Thursday, letting him campaign in a by-election on which he is staking his political future after a 10-year absence.

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has rejected a request by a Bush administration human rights envoy to visit a factory park in the North where South Korean firms make goods using cheap labor from the North, an official said on Tuesday.

Michele Kambas is a senior correspondent in Cyprus, where she has worked for Reuters since 1995. A British national, she has lived on the east Mediterranean island for 20 years. In the following story, she recounts the upheaval caused by stringent water rationing and one of the worst droughts on record.

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Just hours before flying to Beijing for the Olympics on Thursday, U.S. President George W. Bush used some of his bluntest language yet in publicly pressing China to improve its human rights record.

TRINIDAD, Bolivia (Reuters) - Anti-government protesters on Wednesday mounted roadblocks and surrounded an airport, forcing Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales to abandon rallies days before a recall vote.

DENVER (Reuters) - Protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Denver can be restricted to fenced-in areas, federal judge ruled on Wednesday, saying that security needs outweighed curbs on their rights.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Millionaire socialite Paris Hilton has jumped into the U.S. election campaign, calling Republican candidate John McCain a "wrinkly white-haired guy" and offering her own energy policy.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Roadside bomb incidents involving U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan hit their highest level in at least four years between April and June, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Britain on Wednesday criticized a United Nations probe into the March storming of a courthouse by U.N. and NATO troops in Kosovo that concluded that commanders had ignored cautionary advice from New York.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has urged the Bush administration to shelve a nuclear trade deal with India unless it can guarantee compliance with a U.S. law that would suspend trade if India tested a nuclear weapon again.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Leaders of Pakistan's civilian coalition consulted into the early hours of Thursday morning on whether to strip President Pervez Musharraf, a key U.S. ally, of his powers and possibly impeach him.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Gunmen killed a senior police homicide investigator in Ciudad Juarez on the U.S.-Mexico border, the fourth policeman killed in the city this week, an attorney general's office said on Wednesday.