Czech President Vaclav Klaus signs the Lisbon Treaty, an agreement meant to streamline European Union decision-making that includes the establishment of an E.U. president. Klaus was the last hold out on the document, which required the unanimous support of all 27 E.U. member states. The treaty could now take effect as early as December.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic appears at his war crimes trial at the Hague after having boycotted it last week, but asks for 10 months to prepare his defense. Judges temporarily adjourn the case while they decide what to do.

The European Court of Human Rights rules that crucifixes should be removed from classrooms in Italy.

Claude Levi-Strauss, considered the father of modern anthropology, dies at at 100.

Equatorial Guinea pardons Simon Mann, a British ex-special forces officer who was sentenced to 34 years in prison last year for plotting to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Mann’s co-conspirators are also pardoned. The story of the failed coup attempt is depicted in WIDE ANGLE’s Once Upon a Coup.

President Hamid Karzai is declared winner of Afghanistan’s disputed elections after his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, withdraws from the race.

Suicide attacks hit two of Pakistan’s largest cities — thirty people are killed in a blast in near  Pakistani army headquarters in Rawalpindi, and two suicide bombers and a policeman are killed in a car bombing at a police checkpoint in Lahore.

French-Senegalese writer Marie NDiaye becomes the first black woman to win France’s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for her book Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Powerful Women), about three women, each with one foot in France and the other in Africa.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic says he will appear at his war crimes trial in the Hague tomorrow after having boycotted last week.

Members of the Iranian opposition plan to use Wednesday’s 30th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran to renew their challenge to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The U.K.’s Telegraph reports that, in an act sure to anger the current regime, opposition leaders plan to apologise to the U.S. for the 1979 takeover.

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and defacto leader Roberto Micheletti agree to a deal that could lead to the creation of a power-sharing government with Zelaya resotred to the presidency. The deal, already hailed as “an historic agreement” by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, must now be approved by the Honduran congress.

In one of the biggest changes in the forty-year history of the Internet, web addresses written in non-Latin characters will soon be allowed.

Former French President Jacques Chirac is ordered to stand trial on corruption charges dating back to his time as the mayor of Paris in the 1980s and 90s.

Saudi Arabia prepares for the annual hajj in the midst of the swine flu pandemic. Vulnerable groups such as pregnant women and the elderly have been advised not to make the trip this year.

Haiti’s senate ousts Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis. Pierre Louis was the fifth prime minister the politically volatile country has seen in the past five years.

Iran hands over an initial response to a draft deal with the U.N. under which the country’s uranium would be sent abroad for processing. Iran is seeking two crucial changes to the plan — a slower timetable for delivery and the “simultaneous exchange” of nuclear fuel in return — but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the country is ready to cooperate.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda deny involvement in yesterday’s bombing that killed over 100 people in a crowded market in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Kuwait’s highest court rules that female parliamentarians do not need to wear a headscarf. The ruling comes a few weeks after another victory for women’s rights in the country, in which the court ruled that married women do not need their husbands’ approval in order to obtain a passport.

On the sidelines of an E.U. summit in Brussels, the discussion of who will be named the bloc’s first president heats up. Britain’s Tony Blair, Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker and Latvia’s Vaira Vike-Freiberga top the list of possibilities.

Nearly 100 people are killed in a massive car bombing in Peshawar, the provincial capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier. The blast hit a popular market full of fabric and clothing shops frequented mostly by women, and many of the dead are women and children. The attack comes as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits the country.

Six U.N. staffers and two Afghan security guards are killed in an attack on their guest house in central Kabul. A Taliban spokesman takes credit, siting the U.N.’s involvement in Afghanistan’s presidential elections as the reason for the attack.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and a suspected drug trafficker, has been on the CIA’s payroll for much of the past eight years.

Voters go to the polls in Mozambique’s fourth democratic election since a civil war ended in 1992. Incumbent President Armando Guebuza, whose economic reforms made Mozambique’s economy one of the fastest growing in the world at one point, is poised to win.

Eight Americans are killed in a bomb attack in southern Afghanistan bringing October’s death toll to 53 — the deadliest month for Americans in the eight-year war.

Radovan Karadzic continues to boycott his war crimes trial in the Hague, but the proceedings begin without him.

A French court convicts the Church of Scientology of fraud. Group leaders are fined and imprisioned, but the court stops short of banning the organization, registered as a religion in the U.S. but considered a sect in France.

Eight Afghan refugees, including five children and three women, drown off the Greek island of Lesbos. Ten others survive, all Afghans except for one Turkish national who is arrested on suspicion of human trafficking. Lesbos is a major point of entry for migrants hoping to make a new life in the European Union.

The death toll from Sunday’s pair of suicide attacks on government buildings in downtown Baghdad climbs to 155, including as many as 30 children who were at the Justice Ministry’s day care center at the time of the attacks.

At least 14 Americans are killed in two separate helicopter crashes in Afghanistan, the largest number of Americans killed in a single day in Afghanistan in more than four years.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic boycotts the first day of his own war crimes trial in the Hague, forcing the judge to adjourn the case for the day and infuriating survivors who had traveled from Bosnia to see Karadzic face justice.

Juanita Castro, the younger sister of Fidel and Raúl Castro, says she collaborated with the CIA in the 1960s both from inside Cuba and after going into exile in Miami in 1964.

Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency inspect Iran’s newly-revealed nuclear plant near Qom.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) launches its first human rights commission, but establishing credibility for the new watchdog group will be a challenge in a region that includes member states such as Burma, ruled by a military junta, and Laos, ruled by a reclusive communist regime.

Fifteen people are killed when a bus carrying passengers to a wedding hits an anti-tank mine in Pakistan’s tribal belt, seven die in a suicide bombing near an air force complex in the country’s northwest, and over a dozen are wounded in a blast outside a popular restaurant in Peshawar, in the latest of a wave of militant attacks that has left nearly 200 dead this month.

Meeting in the Slovakian capital Bratislava, NATO defense ministers agree to the broad counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan laid out by U.S. General Stanley McChrystal.

Fear of the swine flu closes 2,500 schools in Iraq.

At least 20 people are killed in a battle between Islamic militants and African peacekeepers after militants attack the main airport in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Taliban militants assassinate a Pakistani army brigadier and his driver. Brigadier Moin-ud-din Ahmed was deputy force commander of the United Nations Mission in Sudan, and was home in Islamabad on vacation when two assailants on a motorbike shot at his army jeep in rush-hour traffic.

Twenty-five years after a the famine that killed nearly a million people, Ethiopia’s government asks the international community for emergency food aid for 6.2 million people.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadizic announces that he will boycott his trial for genocide scheduled to start in the Hague next Monday, complaining that he has not been given enough time to prepare his defense.

Israeli sources report that Israel and Iran both attended nuclear talks in Cairo last month and that the Israeli and Iranian delegations met several times, the first direct contact between the two nations in 30 years. Iran denies that such talks took place.