The U.S. military is planning to elevate the role of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan as it shifts away from a combat focus to a mission that places greater emphasis on advising Afghan forces and raids to kill top insurgent leaders, senior U.S. officials said.

CAIRO — Egyptian authorities have charged the Egypt country directors of the International Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute in an investigation into the financing of pro-democracy organizations, state media reported Monday.

JERUSALEM — The rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas have agreed that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will head a joint government that will prepare for new elections, ending a prolonged stalemate over how to mend their bitter split.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has closed the U.S. Embassy in Damascus and pulled all American diplomats out of Syria.

Officials say Ambassador Robert Ford and other diplomats left Syria on Monday. It’s the most dramatic U.S. move so far after 11 months of a violent crackdown on dissent by President Bashar Assad’s regime.

NAIROBI — Everyone in Kenya knows the phrase “kitu kidogo.”

It means “something small” in Swahili, and it refers to the bribes Kenyans pay minor bureaucrats, such as policemen and utility company employees, to make life easier. For decades, Kenyans had only their relatives and friends to complain to. Until now, that is.

The Obama administration is considering nominating retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as the next commander of the U.S. European Command, a move that could stir controversy among some senior military officials who have clashed with Lute over war policy.

DARAA, Syria — Nearly 11 months ago, protests against local authorities began in this small southern town and spread to become an uprising against the government of Bashar al-Assad that engulfed Syria.

SAO PAULO, Brazil — It just made sense to be in South America’s economic heart, Jonathan Rosenthal reasoned, no matter that he had been working on Wall Street with some of the investment world’s most heady firms.

In his first extended public appearance as CIA director, David H. Petraeus this week did more than display his well-known discipline for staying on message. He did his best to bring other government voices back on message as well.

As the FBI and Scotland Yard conducted a conference call last month on their investigation of an international group of hackers, the discussions were being secretly monitored -- by the hackers themselves.

Open intelligence hearings on Capitol Hill are never completely open. Lawmakers and witnesses try to stick to what’s safe to say in public, without disclosing details on espionage operations or what’s happening behind the scenes in Washington.

A retired U.S. Army general with a history of making inflammatory remarks about  Islam has canceled his plans to be the featured guest at an event at the U.S.  Military Academy at West Point, the academy said.

A study released Friday has shaken up much of what we thought we knew about malaria.

The number of people who die annually of the tropical disease is roughly double the current estimate, according to the report, published in the science journal Lancet. Additionally, many of malaria’s victims are now believed to be adults, overturning the previous belief that adults almost never die of the disease.

Anonymous has struck — and struck again.

Early Friday, the FBI said that hackers from the well-known collective had intercepted and released a confidential conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard.

As Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered an impassioned anti-Israel speech Friday, a smaller fight played out between the two countries over a tablet commercial.

In the teaser, a bored agent for Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, is shown watching TV on his Samsung tablet while in Isfahan, south of Tehran. After the agent begins conversing about the features of the tablet with several Iranian “women” (actually men from an Israeli TV show), one of them presses on the tablet and accidentially blows up a nearby uranium enrichment plant.

Following our Friday tradition, we give you this photo. It should not be too hard to guess where it is from.

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Update, 11:51 p.m.: The two American tourists have been released The women were not immediatebly identified, but Egyptian officials said they were age 60 and 65.

Two female tourists and their Egyptian tour guide Friday were intercepted by gunmen and kidnapped in the southern part of the Sinai peninsula, The Post’s Ernesto Londono reports.

NEW DELHI — The Indian government’s recent announcement that it taps nearly 300 new phones every day has sparked a debate about privacy in a country that traditionally views such concerns as an ugly offshoot of Western individualism.