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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Vatican approves an initiative to bring Anglicans, some of whom are dismayed by their church’s acceptance of same-sex marriages and gay and female bishops, into the Catholic Church.

A double suicide bombing at the International Islamic University in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad kills seven people, including the two attackers.

Reporters Without Borders releases its annual Press Freedom Index. Topping the list are northern European countries such as Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Norway; those faring worst include China, Laos, Cuba, Burma, Iran, Turmenistan and North Korea. Eritrea, where no independent journalism is tolerated and 30 journalists are currently in prision, comes in dead last. The U.S. moves up 16 slots to rank 20th.

The U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission finds that thousands of votes for Afghan President Hamid Karzai were fraudulent, leaving Karzai’s share of the vote in the disputed August election at only 48% — not enough to avoid a runoff.

Forty-two people are killed as Iran is hit by the country’s worst suicide bombings in years. Iranian officials claim that the attack was launched from Pakistan with American and British involvement.

Prosecutors accuse Sudanese rebel leader Bahr Idriss Abu Garda of planning an attack that killed 12 African Union peacekeepers in the first Darfur-related case to reach the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

No one will be awarded this year’s $5 million Mo Ibrahim prize for good governance in Africa because the selection committee could not find a suitable candidate.

Eleven people are killed in a car bombing in Peshawar, Pakistan, the latest is a series of attacks that have killed at least 150 people this month. The Pentagon ramps up delivery of nearly $200 million worth of military equipment and services to aid the Pakistani army in its fight against militants.

Sixteen people are killed when a gunman attacks worshipers during Friday prayers at a mosque in Northern Iraq.

Ali Bongo is sworn in as President of Gabon. Ali’s father, Omar Bongo Ondimba, had ruled the country for 41 years before his death in June.

The U.N.’s human rights chief endorses the Gladstone Report, which accuses both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants of committing war crimes during last winter’s conflict in Gaza.

Turkish police detain 50 suspected members of the Islamic Jihad League, a group linked to Al Qaeda, who were allegedly plotting attacks on NATO installation sin Turkey and Germany.

A 48-year-old France Telecom engineer hangs himself, becoming the 25 employee of the company to commit suicide in the past 20 months. Many of the employees have left notes blaming stress at work as the company undergoes major restructuring.

At least 85,000 Iraqis were violently killed between 2004 and 2008, according to figures released by the Iraqi goverment. Among the dead were 2,334 women, 1,279 children, 263 professors, 21 judges, 95 lawyers and 269 journalists.

Britain agrees to send 500 additional troops to Afghanistan, increasing the size of the British force from 9,000 to 9,500, on the condition that the Afghans and NATO allies also increase their commitment in the area.

Nearly 10,000 couples from more than 100 countries are married in a mass wedding officiated by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in Seoul, South Korea. The wedding is likely the last for Moon, 89, who is passing on the leadership of his Unification Church to his son.