Russian protest leader and virulent Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said Thursday investigators had slapped him with fresh charges of fraud and money laundering in a new probe that also involved his brother.

"Fraud on an especially large scale and laundering. I criminally founded a firm that offered services," Navalny sarcastically wrote on his Twitter account, moments before Russia's powerful Investigative Committee announced the charges on its website.

A massive and dangerous winter snowstorm blanketed the U.S. Midwest on Thursday, grounding planes and making roads and highways impassable as travelers gear up for the Christmas holiday.

The region's first big storm of the season dumped more than a foot (30 centimeters) of snow in parts of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota overnight and more was expected as the powerful system moved slowly eastward.

An ISAF soldier has gone missing in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said on Thursday, more than three years after an American army sergeant was taken prisoner by the Taliban.

The Georgian soldier is believed to be the first soldier from the NATO-led mission to have gone missing since Bowe Bergdahl, now thought to be 26, was taken on June 30, 2009 in the southeastern province of Paktika.

Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree on Thursday recognizing the "heroic virtues" of late pope Paul VI, putting him on the first step towards beatification and eventual sainthood.

Italian-born Giovanni Battista Montini, who was elected pope in 1963 and reigned until 1978, oversaw a complex series of reforms in the Roman Catholic Church following the Vatican II Council.

55 Somalis and Ethiopians drowned or went missing after their boat capsized off Somalia on Tuesday in the worst such disaster in the area in almost two years, the United Nations said.

The U.N. refugee agency said Thursday the incident represents "the biggest loss of life" in the Gulf of Aden since February 2011 when 57 Somali refugees and migrants from the Horn of Africa drowned while attempting to reach Yemen.

Riots that rocked the South Sudanese town of Wau killed at least 12 people, a hospital doctor said Thursday, revising the previous day's toll of four dead.

"They were 12, those were the ones reported to the area hospitals," with bodies showing "various injuries", Marial Khoc, a doctor at Wau's military hospital told AFP.

A Russian court on Thursday reduced the sentence of jailed Kremlin critic and former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky to 11 from from 13 years, setting his release for 2014, his press service said.

The Moscow City Court decided to cut the prison term served by the Yukos oil company founder and his co-defendant Platon Lebedev by two years due to changes in the criminal legislation that affect the charges against them.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti sparred with Silvio Berlusconi on Thursday over the need for austerity, as local media reported the economics professor was preparing to take on the colorful billionaire in a looming election campaign.

"We are really only just beginning," Monti said in a speech at a Fiat car factory in southern Italy in which he defended the "bitter medicine" of the budget discipline he has implemented and warned against any attempt to turn back the clock.

Representatives of Afghanistan's warring factions met here Thursday for two days of landmark talks that diplomats hope will bolster a fledgling peace process in the war-torn country.

For the first time since a U.S.-led bombing campaign drove the Taliban from power in 2001, senior figures in the Islamist movement sat down with officials from the government and other opposition forces for a round table discussion on the country's future that was brokered by a French think tank.

A roadside bomb targeting a police pickup truck killed two policemen and five civilians in southwestern Afghanistan Thursday, provincial authorities said.

The vehicle was blown up in the city of Zaranj, the capital of Nimroz province, said acting provincial police chief Mohammad Rahim Chakhansori.