WASHINGTON - Obama says treasury secretary requested and received resignation of acting IRS commissioner.

After scrambling up a steep mountainside in north Afghanistan, Morad Ali crouches beside a gap cut in the slope and touches some reddish-brown rock. "The gold is in here," he says. Ali was one of generations of local men who used chisels and pickaxes to extract small amounts of gold from the forbidding peaks above the village of Qara Zaghan on the edge of the Hindu Kush mountains.

Funerals for eight of the nine victims of a container ship crash in the port of Genoa last week were held in Italy on Wednesday, as prosecutors said the vessel's engine was broken. The Jolly Nero ploughed into a dock during a reverse manoeuvre to exit the port on May 7, toppling a 50-metre (164-foot) control tower that oversaw shipping for the whole northwest of Italy. Salvage workers at the site are still searching the rubble for the ninth victim's body.

Romania, whose justice system is closely monitored by the European Union, Wednesday announced the appointment of a new anti-corruption prosecutor after months of controversy over the key post. President Traian Basescu appointed Laura Codruta Kovesi, 40, to the job by decree. She has drawn praise from the EU for her previous work as Romania's prosecutor general, a job she took on aged 33. She will be replaced in her own old job by Tiberiu Nitu, a controversial prosecutor whose previous appointment was rejected by the magistrates' supreme council.