SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's rubber stamp parliament will meet in April for an annual session where the secretive and isolated state typically reveals changes to its ruling elite and spending priorities for the coming year.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama renewed his administration's offer of dialogue and diplomacy with Tehran on Saturday, a year after his offer of a new beginning with Iran failed to achieve concrete results.

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Armed men likely linked to drug gangs blocked highways with trucks and buses in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey on Friday in an apparent attempt to hamper army operations near the U.S. border.

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's former foreign minister Noemi Sanin won the country's Conservative Party candidacy for May's presidential election in a decision that risks splitting President Alvaro Uribe's political coalition.

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Armed men likely linked to drug gangs blocked highways with trucks and buses in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey on Friday in an apparent attempt to hamper army operations near the U.S. border.

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Former Colombian foreign minister Noemi Sanin has won the country's Conservative Party candidacy for the presidential race in May, according to tallies of more than 99 percent of votes on Friday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - In a harrowing memoir she has yet to read herself, Nujood Ali tells how at age 9 she was forced to marry a man three times her age, raped and beaten, then made Yemeni history by getting a divorce.

FREETOWN (Reuters) - Sierra Leone's minister of mineral resources denied on Friday that at least 200 people were killed in the collapse of a gold mine, causing confusion after his own ministry had reported the disaster.

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli aircraft struck at least seven targets in the Gaza Strip on Friday, a day after a rocket fired from the Palestinian enclave killed a Thai worker in Israel, Hamas security officials and witnesses said.

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Almost a quarter of a billion people moved out of slum conditions in the past decade, driven by rapid economic growth in emerging giants India and China, but the number of people living in them continues to rise, the United Nations housing agency said on Friday.