Iraq's top Shiite cleric has denounced the abduction earlier this month of up to 26 falconry hunters from Qatar who were seized by gunmen in a remote desert area in southern Iraq.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani says such acts are against the "religious laws and the moral principles of Iraqis and affect the reputation of the country."

Nicolas Cage has agreed to give back a national treasure from Mongolia.

A publicist for the star of the "National Treasure" adventure films confirmed Tuesday that Cage was the unwitting buyer of a dinosaur skull that federal prosecutors in New York say was stolen. Prosecutors announced last week that they were seeking court approval to take custody of the 32-inch fossil so it could be returned to the Asian nation, but they did not name the buyer.

One of New Jersey's "Real Housewives" is set to be freed after serving nearly a year in prison for bankruptcy fraud.

A lawyer for Teresa Giudice (JOO'-dys) says she will travel home to Montville, New Jersey, upon her release Wednesday from the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut. She will be on home confinement until Feb. 5.

A man convicted of hijacking a Spanish airliner in 1996 on its way from Madrid to Havana has been removed from the U.S. by federal immigration officials.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said in a news release that officers took 47-year-old Saado Mohamed Ibrahim on Sunday from Jacksonville to Beirut, where he was handed over to officials.

The country's trash collection crisis, which set off huge protests this summer, is entering its sixth month, but you would hardly know it in Beirut.

Not only are the capital's streets kept relatively garbage-free, but the country's politicians have been in no hurry to resolve the catastrophe.

Thousands of people gathered Monday in the southern Beirut suburb of Ghobeiri for the funeral of high-profile Hizbullah militant Samir al-Quntar, who the group says was killed by an Israeli airstrike near the Syrian capital.

Hizbullah said Quntar, who spent 30 years in an Israeli prison after a deadly operation in northern Israel, was killed Saturday along with eight others in the airstrike on a residential building in Jaramana, close to Damascus.

Several of Hizbullah's allies in the region condemned Sunday the assassination of the group's top militant Samir al-Quntar in a raid in Syria.

Syrian Prime Minister Wael Halaqi condemned the attack, saying targeting Quntar was equivalent to "targeting the axis of resistance," referring to Syria and its allies.

A landslide at an industrial park in southern China buried more than 20 buildings and left 22 people missing on Sunday, state media reported, as more than 1,500 emergency workers searched the scene. 

Rescuers pulled four people from the debris after the accident in the southern city of Shenzhen bordering Hong Kong, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Hizbullah figure Samir al-Quntar was killed in an Israeli air raid near the Syrian capital, media reports said on Sunday.

Israeli warplanes targeted a building where Quntar and a number of his companions were residing in Hay al-Homsi in Jarmana southeast of Damascus, killing an unidentified number, media reports said.

At tightly guarded facilities in south Lebanon, men as young as 17 undergo training by Hizbullah on weapons and anti-insurgent tactics before being sent to Syria to fight alongside President Bashar Assad's forces, according to an Associated Press report published on Friday.

Hizbullah has been conducting a large recruitment drive, a sign of how the war in Syria has become perhaps the most intense conflict the group has waged. Its losses in Syria -- now more than 1,000 killed – are approaching the toll incurred by the group in 18 years of fighting the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s. That conflict earned Hizbullah its reputation as Lebanon's strongest armed force.