As Poland's Catholic Church prepares to celebrate 1,050 years as the national faith, a call by its bishops for a total ban on abortion has embroiled the church in a divisive and potentially harmful debate.

The church that was crucial in preserving the nation's spirit and identity in World War II and under decades of communism has now provoked massive street protests and even a walkout from one church.

A project to speed development of cancer-fighting drugs that harness the immune system has academic and drug industry researchers collaborating and sharing their findings like never before.

The newly created Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy is being funded by a $250 million grant from Sean Parker, the co-founder of the file-sharing site Napster and Facebook's first president. It brings together partners at six top academic cancer centers, dozens of drugmakers and other groups.

Back in Syria, the young women were told they would get well-paid jobs at restaurants and hotels in Lebanon. But when they arrived, their belongings and mobile phones were taken away, and the women were locked up in two hotels north of Beirut and forced into prostitution.

What followed was an ordeal of beatings, torture and abuse — until Lebanese security forces raided the hotels and dismantled the operation in late March.

Australian government was providing top-level consular support to an Australian television crew facing charges after being caught up in a mother's bungled child-snatching attempt in Lebanon, Australia's prime minister said on Wednesday.

An Australian mother, a four-member TV crew from Nine Network, two British agents from the Britain-based Child Abduction Recovery International company, known as CARI, and two Lebanese men have been in police custody since two Lebanese-Australian siblings Lahala, 6, and Noah, 4, were snatched from a South Beirut bus stop last week in a bid to smuggle them out of the country.

U.S. authorities have said that an Ohio man has pleaded guilty in federal court to a charge related to the sale of 300 guns, including 11 destined for Beirut.

Forty-eight-year-old Richfield Township resident Timothy Cassinger pleaded guilty Tuesday in Akron to a single count of unlicensed gun dealing.

Greece and its bailout creditors have suspended talks on the country's austerity program until next week, after a new set of marathon overnight negotiations failed to produce a breakthrough.

Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos says the meetings in Athens would resume April 18, with an aim to reaching an agreement by April 22, when he is due to meet with his peers from the 19-country eurozone.

A senior Palestinian official with the mainstream Fatah Movement was killed on Tuesday in a car bombing in the southern city of Sidon.

Reports said that Fathi Zaidan died and four others, including two bodyguards, were injured in the blast near Ain el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp.

One North Korean who worked abroad says that as a waitress in China, she was forced to put up with male customers who groped her and tried to get her drunk. Two others recall the frozen bodies of their countrymen stored in Russian logging camps. Another says he toiled for up to 16 hours a day at a Kuwaiti construction site surrounded by wire fences.

As difficult as those lives were, the four workers told The Associated Press, it beat staying in the North. The jobs actually conveyed status back home, and were so coveted that people used bribes and family connections to get them.

A contractor said Tuesday that he negotiated with an Australian television network to snatch two Lebanese-Australian children from their father's family in Beirut but the network chose a cheaper option.

Col Chapman, who describes himself as a child recovery specialist, said executives at the Nine Network's "60 Minutes" program told him to "sharpen his pencil" when he quoted them 150,000 Australian dollars ($114,000) late last year to get the children Lahala, 6, and Noah, 4, out of Lebanon.

Paris police say protesters angry over a labor reform damaged stores and restaurants and injured two police officers during a rogue overnight march.

Thousands of people have been gathering for the past 11 nights at the Place de la Republique to express frustration at a bill extending the workweek and making layoffs easier. The fledgling Occupy-style movement has expanded to include a range of grievances and visitors from other cities and countries.