BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thousands of opposition activists prepared to fan out across Thailand's capital on Saturday in a bid to win the hearts of Bangkok's middle classes and recruit them for their anti-government campaign.

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli aircraft struck at least seven targets in the Gaza Strip on Friday, a day after a rocket fired from the Palestinian enclave killed a Thai worker in Israel, Hamas security officials and witnesses said.

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Armed men likely linked to drug gangs blocked highways with trucks and buses in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey on Friday in an apparent attempt to hamper army operations near the U.S. border.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan rejected on Friday a suggestion from the former head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan that the arrest of senior Afghan Taliban members in Pakistan may have disrupted talks with U.N. representatives.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday that Russia could sign up to a sanctions resolution on Iran, Russian news agencies quoted a senior Putin aide as saying.

SANTO DOMINGO (Reuters) - A Dominican Republic man who acted as legal adviser to a group of U.S. missionaries held for several weeks in Haiti on child kidnapping charges has been arrested in Santo Domingo, local police said on Friday.

FREETOWN (Reuters) - Sierra Leone's minister of mineral resources denied on Friday that at least 200 people were killed in the collapse of a gold mine, causing confusion after his own ministry had reported the disaster.

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's former foreign minister Noemi Sanin won the country's Conservative Party candidacy for May's presidential election in a decision that risks splitting President Alvaro Uribe's political coalition.

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Almost a quarter of a billion people moved out of slum conditions in the past decade, driven by rapid economic growth in emerging giants India and China, but the number of people living in them continues to rise, the United Nations housing agency said on Friday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - In a harrowing memoir she has yet to read herself, Nujood Ali tells how at age 9 she was forced to marry a man three times her age, raped and beaten, then made Yemeni history by getting a divorce.