Stanley McChrystal, the former U.S. commander in Afghanistan who was sacked by President Barack Obama over a magazine interview, said Friday his new memoir steers clear of gossip and scandal.

The retired four-star general's book, "My Share of the Task," is due out next week but he said he avoided settling scores in his account of his military career, which included clashes with Obama's advisers over the Afghan war.

Congress certified Friday what the world has known for nearly two months -- President Barack Obama's re-election, which was made official through the counting of the Electoral College's votes.

Only then, after votes from each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia were tabulated, was Obama officially declared the winner over Republican Mitt Romney -- a quaint formality, perhaps, but also constitutionally required.

U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Maura Connelly welcomed on Friday the Lebanese cabinet's decision of maintaining an open border with Syria, saluting its adoption of a “comprehensive plan” to meet the needs of refugees.

“We praise the government's continuous efforts to abide by its international obligations towards refugees,” Connelly said in a statement released after she met with Energy Minister Jebran Bassil.

A new U.S. drone strike on Thursday killed three al-Qaida suspects in the town of Rada in Yemen's central al-Bayda province, the site of similar recent attacks, tribal sources there said.

Mukbel Abbad, brother-in-law of Tareq al-Dahab who led the al-Qaida fighters in a brief January 2012 raid on Rada, was killed along with two other suspects, the sources said.

Amid a national debate on how to stop gun massacres in public places, one town in New Jersey began posting armed police at every school on the restart of the academic year Wednesday.

The new policy was the town of Marlboro's response to anguished questions over security in the wake of December's massacre in which a gunman shot 20 young children and six staff dead at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Iran on Wednesday said it had shot down two U.S.-made RQ-11 reconnaissance drones in the past 15 months, adding to a ScanEagle drone and RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft it already claims to have captured.

"The army's air defense shot down two... RQ-11 drones," Rear Admiral Amir Rastegari told state television and Fars news agency, adding that the army was carrying out "research" on the downed unmanned aircraft.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday he had fulfilled a campaign promise to make the U.S. tax system fairer with a deal to avert the fiscal cliff crisis that passed after a fierce duel in Congress.

"The one thing that I think hopefully in the New Year we'll focus on is seeing if we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little bit less brinksmanship, not scare the heck out of folks quite as much," he said.

Spoiler alert: This story contains words and phrases that some people want to ban from the English language. "Spoiler alert" is among them. So are "kick the can down the road," ''trending" and "bucket list."

All are on the 38th annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness. The nonbinding, tongue-in-cheek decree released Monday by northern Michigan's Lake Superior State University is based on nominations submitted from the United States, Canada and beyond.

U.S. health regulators said Monday they had licensed a new treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis -- the first such federal approval aimed at tackling the deadly disease in 40 years.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it was approving the drug, named Sirturo, as an alternative treatment for adults suffering from TB when two more powerful medications that are available, isoniazid and rifampicin, do not work.

Top U.S. diplomat Hillary Clinton is suffering from a rare blood clot in a vein in her head but should make a full recovery, doctors said Monday as she spent New Year's Eve in hospital.

A routine follow-up scan on Sunday revealed "that a right transverse sinus venous thrombosis had formed," doctors Lisa Bardack, of Mount Kisco Medical Group, and Gigi El-Bayoumi, of George Washington University, said.