AP - Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Friday welcomed David Petraeus as the new chief of Central Command with responsibility for America's two wars, saying he hopes the general will help bring needed coherence to the U.S. and allied strategy in an increasingly volatile Afghanistan.
AFP - Some points in the draft security accord between Iraq and the United States still have to be clarified, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said in an interview published Friday.
AP - Iraqi Christians have started to trickle home to the restive city of Mosul in recent days as attacks against them have tapered off, authorities said Friday.
Reuters - Iraqi forces hunting al Qaeda members arrested 220 people in a raid in western Anbar province, a former insurgent stronghold, the province's police chief and the U.S. military said Friday.
AFP - Insurgents have blown up a water pipeline in Baghdad's Sunni bastion of Adhamiyah, disrupting supply of potable water to hundreds of thousands of residents, the US military said Friday.
AFP - Crowned with success in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who takes command Friday of US military forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, inherits the next big challenge: devising a winning strategy in Afghanistan.
AFP - The US military said on Friday it had arrested 39 Iranian-sponsored "criminals" in Iraq this month and had seized some 500,000 dollars meant to fund militancy in the war-wracked country.
AP - Tens of thousands crowded a Damascus square in a government-orchestrated rally Thursday to denounce a deadly U.S. raid on Syrian territory near Iraq and send a loud message to America: Leave us alone!
AP - No one knows for sure, but auditors think the U.S. has paid well over $6 billion to private security companies who've been guarding diplomats, troops, Iraqi officials and reconstruction workers in Iraq.
AP - An Iraqi opposition lawmaker claimed Thursday that thousands of his countrymen are being mistreated in detention centers outside the official prison system.