In the garage of his home in a rough-and-tumble Havana neighborhood, Rolando Alfonso is fixing up a 1960 Oldsmobile he hopes will be a ticket to a more profitable future: Driving tourists around Cuba.

After President Barack Obama's visit to the city last week, he's more optimistic than ever that his vision might become reality.

The United Nations says violence killed at least 1,119 Iraqis in March, a sharp increase from the previous month, as the Islamic State group stepped up attacks on civilians despite suffering battlefield setbacks.

Another 1,561 Iraqis were wounded last month, the U.N. mission to Iraq said in a statement Friday. The figures include 575 civilians killed and another 1,196 wounded. The other casualties were Iraqi security forces, including Kurdish forces known as the peshmerga and government-allied militiamen.

Three migrants were hospitalized Friday after a brawl in a camp on the Greek island of Chios, aid groups and media said, as the country prepared to begin returning migrants to Turkey under an EU deal.

North Korea has officially announced it is blocking Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and South Korean websites in a move underscoring its concern with the spread of online information.

The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications announcement was posted this week at the country's main mobile service provider, Koryolink, and other places serving Internet users.

A Syrian teenager with dark curly hair spends his days hanging around a busy thoroughfare in western Beirut, chasing motorists and following shoppers to ask for money. Further down on Hamra Street, his mother and three younger siblings also have their spots, begging for a living.

Mohammad Hussein, 13, is among the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who fled their country's devastating civil war, now in its sixth year, for refuge next door in tiny Lebanon. Many of the youngest are now out of school and have to work or beg to support their families.

With Islamic State group militants on the doorstep of his hometown in eastern Syria, Yaroob al-Abdullah had little time. He had already rushed his wife and four daughters to safety. Now he had to save the thousands of ancient artifacts he loved.

In a week of furious work in summer heat, tired and dehydrated from the Ramadan fast, the head of antiquities in Deir el-Zour province and his staff packed up most of the contents of the museum in the provincial capital. Then al-Abdullah flew with 12 boxes of relics to Damascus.

Colombia and the country's second-largest rebel group announced Wednesday that they will hold peace talks, heightening expectations for a definitive end to a half-century of political violence in the Andean nation.

The government has been in exploratory talks in Ecuador with the National Liberation Army, or ELN, for more than a year. Negotiators for the two sides announced at a news conference in Caracas, Venezuela, that those talks will now be formalized around a six-point agenda, including justice for victims, disarmament, and reintegration into society.

For Kim Vaillancourt, pregnant while staving off aggressive brain cancer, it comes down to this: "The baby saved me. Now it's my turn to save him."

Vaillancourt was diagnosed with glioblastoma after going to the hospital for headaches and nausea that came on over Christmas. Were it not for concern for the boy she's carrying, she and her husband, Phil, said it was a life-saving trip she would not have made.

Israeli and American energy companies controlling Israel's natural gas say they are dissatisfied with a ruling the day before by Israel's Supreme Court that struck down a government deal to begin pumping from offshore deposits.

David Stover, the chairman of Houston-based Noble Energy, said on Monday that the ruling is "disappointing."

Pope Francis on Sunday spoke out against the "rejection" of migrants and refugees in his Easter message, as Europe struggles with its biggest migration crisis since World War II.

Security was tight as he delivered his Easter mass to crowds of people gathered below the central balcony of St Peter's Basilica, just days after the deadly bombings in Brussels.