David Coleman Headley, who helped plot the devastating 2008 Mumbai attacks before agreeing to become an informer, was sentenced by a U.S. judge on Thursday to 35 years in prison.

Headley, 52, struck a deal to avoid the death penalty by pleading guilty to scoping out Mumbai on behalf of Pakistani militants and to a second plot to attack a Danish newspaper over cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed.

Ushering in a new era for the U.S. military, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday officially ended a ban on women serving in ground combat, saying female troops had proven their courage in a decade of war.

The decision reflected changed realities on the battlefield, Pentagon officials said, as female soldiers already have been fighting and dying in conflicts that lacked clear frontlines.

American foreign policy is more than just drones and troops, Senator John Kerry pledged Thursday, as he outlined to U.S. lawmakers his priorities if they back him as the next secretary of state.

"American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployments alone," he told the Senate Foreign Relations committee, sitting across from the committee which he has been a member of for 29 years, and which he has also chaired.

At least three people -- including a gunman -- were shot at a Texas college following a dispute Tuesday, officials said as details trickled out from the chaotic campus.

The shooting comes as the United States is embroiled in a debate on gun violence in the wake of the horrific massacre of 20 first graders and six staff members at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school.

The U.S. military has started airlifting French troops and equipment into Mali to assist their operation against al-Qaida-linked Islamist rebels, the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) said Tuesday.

"At the request of the French government, we have begun flying equipment and personnel from France to Mali," an AFRICOM spokesman, Chuck Prichard, told Agence France Presse.

President Barack Obama issued a impassioned call for equality and national unity as he was inaugurated for a second term Monday, warning political "absolutism" must not thwart renewal and change.

Obama was publicly sworn in for another four White House years before a flag waving crowd of hundreds of thousands on Washington's National Mall. Then he delivered an address steeped in poetic power and broad hints of his new agenda.

The U.N. atomic agency said Monday that its next round of talks in Tehran will be on February 13, not on February 12 as it had stated last week.

"In fact the talks will be held on February 13 rather than February 12," International Atomic Energy Agency spokeswoman Gill Tudor told AFP. No reason was given for the change.

President Barack Obama took the oath of office Sunday to begin a second term threatened by strife at home and abroad and amid inaugural rituals lacking the hope and historic promise of 2009.

Obama, with a slight smile, took the oath at an intimate, private ceremony in the Blue Room of the White House lasting less than a minute, raising his right arm and placing his left hand on a family Bible.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden re-took the oath of office Sunday as Barack Obama officially begins his second term, a day ahead of public festivities planned for Monday.

Biden placed his hand on a thick and weathered-looking bible held by his wife, Jill, and pledged to "support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

The U.S. State Department has ordered all family members of embassy employees to leave Mali, amid the country's escalating conflict with Islamist militants who control the vast arid north.

The order late Friday follows a tumultuous week in which gunmen across the border in Algeria staged a deadly raid on a remote gas plant, taking an unknown number of foreign hostages.