World datelines

Afghanistan: 12 killed

KABUL — Bombings and shootings killed 12 people across Afghanistan, including four American troops and three children, as President Barack Obama convened his war council again Monday to fine-tune a strategy to respond to the intransigent violence.

Three U.S. troops were killed in southern Afghanistan on Sunday — two in a bombing and a third in a separate firefight — while another was killed in the east of the country in a bombing on Monday, NATO said in a statement.

The deaths bring the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan in November to 15. October was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the eight-year war, with 59 dead.

China: Dissident jailed

BEIJING — A veteran dissident was sentenced to three years in prison after casting a spotlight on poorly built schools that collapsed and killed thousands of children during China's massive earthquake last year — an apparent government attempt to squelch such information.

Huang Qi, founder of a human-rights Web site, had been charged with illegally possessing state secrets, his wife Zeng Li said Monday by telephone. His detention in June 2008 came after several posts on his blog that criticized the government's response to the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan province a month earlier and killed about 90,000 people.

Iran: 'Soft war'

Stung by the force and persistence of the protests after last summer's disputed presidential election, the government of Iran appears to be starting a far more ambitious effort to discredit its opponents and re-educate Iran's mostly young and restive population.

In recent weeks, the government has announced a variety of new ideological offensives.

It is implanting 6,000 Basij militia centers in elementary schools across Iran to promote the ideals of the Islamic Revolution, and it has created a new police unit to sweep the Internet for dissident voices.

A company affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards acquired a majority share in the nation's telecommunications monopoly this year, giving the Guards de facto control of Iran's land-lines, Internet providers and two cell phone companies. The government calls it "soft war," rooted in an old accusation that Iran's domestic ills are the result of Western cultural subversion.

France: New subway?

PARIS — For French leaders with famously large egos, they are hard to resist: grand urban projects meant to secure their legacy in the popular imagination.