Afghan President Hamid Karzai's demand for U.S. special forces to leave a key province came as a surprise to American commanders, who had no advance warning of the order, officials said Monday.

It remained unclear what led Karzai to issue a blunt announcement that U.S. special operations force would have two weeks to withdraw from the strategic Wardak province, southwest of the capital Kabul, two U.S. officials said.

Two more Tibetans have died after setting themselves ablaze in China, Western rights groups said Monday, the latest in a string of self-immolations carried out in protest against Chinese rule.

The Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) and London-based Free Tibet said in separate releases that a man identified as Tsesung Kyab set himself on fire in front of a Buddhist monastery in western Gansu province.

A video appeared on YouTube Monday of seven kidnapped members of a French family with their abductors, who claimed to be from Islamist extremist group Boko Haram and demanded the release of prisoners.

The video represented the first images of the family to emerge since their abduction in Cameroon on February 19.

Britain's most senior Roman Catholic cleric resigned as head of the Catholic Church in Scotland with immediate effect on Monday in the wake of claims that he made sexual advances towards priests.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien -- who steps down as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh -- denies the allegations, which date back to the 1980s, but he apologized to anyone offended by "failures" during his ministry.

Fighting between rival factions of the M23 rebel movement in the northeastern Rutshuru region of the Democratic Republic of Congo has left 10 dead, a hospital source in Rutshuru said Monday.

The provincial hospital said that 10 bodies were counted after the clashes on Sunday night, while two injured men were taken in for medical treatment.

World powers will present Iran with an updated and "good" offer at talks this week on its nuclear program, an EU official said Monday, although hopes for a breakthrough were slim.

Talks aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear drive start in Kazakhstan Tuesday, with the so-called 5+1 world powers represented by the European Union sitting down with an Iranian team led by its top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.

Leftist forces in Italy were poised to win against Silvio Berlusconi on Monday but might fail to snag a majority in the upper house in a key election, with a new anti-austerity party also set to make inroads, exit polls and projections showed.

Pier Luigi Bersani and his leftist coalition were shown ahead in exit polls with between 34.5 and 37 percent, beating the 29 to 31 percent for scandal-tainted former premier Berlusconi's group.

The Vatican said Monday that Pope Benedict XVI, who resigns on Thursday, has signed a special decree giving cardinals "the possibility to bring forward" a conclave to elect his successor.

"I leave the College of Cardinals the possibility to bring forward the start of the conclave once all cardinals are present, or push the beginning of the election back by a few days should there be serious reasons," the pope said.

Thousands of Ukrainians protested in Kiev Monday against "political repressions" by the government of President Viktor Yanukovych as he flew to Brussels for a key Ukraine-European Union summit.

About five thousand protesters marched through central streets of capital Kiev before assembling on the main square, in a strong response to demonstration appeals by three opposition movements.

French warplanes attacked an Islamist base in north Mali at the weekend, wounding four members of the Arab Movement of the Azawad (MAA), after the extremists clashed with Tuareg rebels, MAA and security sources said Monday.

"Four fighters of the MAA were wounded during bombing by the French air force (on Sunday) against our base at Infara," 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the border with Algeria, Boubacar Ould Taleb, a leader of the MAA, told Agence France Presse in the capital Bamako by telephone.