CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - A man armed with a rifle walked into a Workers Compensation Board office in the Western Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta, on Wednesday, and was holding several hostages, police said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's parliament failed on Wednesday to agree on a law that will determine how the next election is run, raising fears of delays for the vote that could consolidate democracy after years of war.

LONDON (Reuters) - Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi is still alive, a Libyan official and Megrahi's Scottish lawyer said on Wednesday, dismissing a report that he had died.

Authorities have closed all educational institutions across the county until at least the end of the week, following twin suicide bombings at an Islamic university on Tuesday.

A train collision in northern India kills at least 13 people and injures 15. The Goa Express bound for New Delhi slammed into the stationary Mewar Express apparently because the driver overshot a signal to stop, a spokesman for India's northern railway says.

The first nine months of this year has seen more pirate attacks than all of last year. And more than half of those attacks were carried out by suspected Somali pirates, an international maritime watchdog group said Wednesday.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said Tuesday they would review polling stations in Afghanistan from which they had received complaints amid widespread criticism that the United Nations failed to provide free and fair balloting in the first round of the country's elections.

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel and the United States launched a major air defense drill Wednesday as part of what Israeli public radio called preparation for a faceoff with Iran.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is expected to announce Tuesday whether he will accept findings that indicate he did not secure enough votes to win a second term.

U.S. President Barack Obama is facing accusations his White House is creating an "enemies list," as administration aides step up efforts to marginalize an array of political opponents in American business and media.

In a new claim of a landmark breakthrough in talks with Iran, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said Wednesday negotiators for the Islamic republic have signed off on a key nuclear-fuel agreement.

Couples who spend more time scrubbing the grout and emptying the dishwasher get more sessions between the sheets.

Canadian troops are prepared to deal with any potential violence arising from a run-off ballot for the Afghan presidency, the senior war planner in Kandahar said Tuesday.

Wildlife advocates are expressing dismay over a planned publicity stunt in which a "real-life Canadian timber wolf" is scheduled to race an English rugby star a to promote a new "eco-conscious" line of running shoes.

An aviation museum in the U.S. state of Ohio that believed it was displaying a hair sample from famed flyer Amelia Earhart made an unfortunate discovery, after DNA analysis revealed it to be a piece of thread.

Indian federal investigators charged two men Wednesday over the death last year of British teenager Scarlett Keeling in the southern resort state of Goa.

U.S. federal prosecutors have charged a Massachusetts man with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, alleging he and co-conspirators traveled to the Middle East seeking training, discussed attacking a shopping center, and distributed videos promoting holy war.

Studies has shown that cellphone users drive more dangerously than other motorists. But studies haven't shown why this happens, or why a cellphone affects drivers more than a car radio or talking to a passenger

A "miracle" baby has brought a kind of mystical hope to people in Russia's mostly Muslim southern fringe who are increasingly desperate in the face of Islamist violence.

A coalition government that would spare Afghan voters a run-off in two weeks was firmly dismissed Wednesday as illegal by Afghanistan's ambassador to Canada.