Troops loyal to President Alassane Ouattara last week killed at least eight people in several incidents in Ivory Coast, the U.N. mission in Ivory Coast (ONUCI) announced Thursday.

In incidents in and around Abidjan and the centre-west of the country, "members of the Republican Forces killed at least eight people and wounded several others," the head of ONUCI's human rights division, Guillaume Ngefa, told a news briefing.

Somali President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed on Thursday appointed Abdiweli Mohamed Ali as prime minister, replacing Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed who resigned under a reconciliation accord.

"He has the personality and the kind of knowledge that makes him fit to become the prime minister," the president said in announcing Ali's appointment.

An Amsterdam court Thursday acquitted Dutch far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders on charges of hate speech and discrimination for statements he made attacking Islam.

"You are being acquitted on all the charges that were put against you," Judge Marcel van Oosten said, reiterating an argument last month by the prosecution that charges against Wilders should be dropped.

Afghanistan's Taliban Thursday dismissed news of U.S. troop withdrawals as mere symbolism, vowing to fight on, but President Hamid Karzai said the move hastened his nation's ability to fend for itself.

Ordinary Afghans seemed split over U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement, after a decade of war, to pull tens of thousands of troops out of Afghanistan and concentrate on "nation-building" in America instead.

British leader David Cameron "fully agreed" with US President Barack Obama that "sustained pressure" could be applied to Afghan insurgents despite a troop cutback, his office said Thursday.

In a call made hours before Obama announced the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops from the war-torn nation, Cameron reaffirmed to the US leader that Britain would remove all of its combat troops by 2015.

France will carry out a progressive pullback of its forces in Afghanistan, with a timetable similar to that announced by for U.S. troops, the president's office said Thursday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said in a statement that NATO member France would make a "progressive" withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan "in a proportional manner and in a timeframe similar to the pullback of the American reinforcements."

President Barack Obama Wednesday ordered all 33,000 U.S. surge troops home from Afghanistan by next summer and declared the beginning of the end of the war, vowing to turn to nation building at home.

In a watershed moment for American foreign policy, Obama also significantly curtailed U.S. war aims, saying Washington would no longer try to build a "perfect" Afghanistan from a nation traumatized by its blood soaked history.

Sudan is beefing up security in areas of South Darfur close to the southern border for fear of unrest around the country's imminent partition, the state's deputy governor said on Wednesday.

"The state has started to increase security in areas on the border with south Sudan to be ready for any disturbances coinciding with separation," Abdelkarim Mousa was quoted as saying by the Sudan Media Centre, a website close to the security forces.

U.S. President Barack Obama will host a NATO summit on Afghanistan in his hometown of Chicago in May 2012, along with the G8 meeting of leaders of industrialized nations, a U.S. official said Wednesday.

Obama will make the announcement about the NATO meeting devoted to progress in the Afghan war during his primetime address laying out a troop drawdown strategy at 8:00 pm Wednesday (0000 GMT), the official said on condition of anonymity.

President Barack Obama called Wednesday for an immediate ceasefire in Sudan's South Kordofan state, where he said the situation is "dire" with government forces accused of ethnic cleansing.

Heavy fighting in the run-up to south Sudan's declaration of independence on July 9 has pitted government troops and allied militias against forces aligned with the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).