BALTIMORE (AP) — All eyes will be on Kentucky Derby winner Orb in the Preakness Stakes on Saturday. The 3-year-old colt will take on eight challengers in the second leg of the Triple Crown. If he wins, Orb will attempt to become the first Triple Crown champion since Affirmed in 1978 at the Belmont Stakes on June 8. In the Preakness, Orb will be facing five horses he defeated in the Derby and three who did not run in the race.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Police officials say gunmen have kidnapped eight Iraqi policemen who were guarding a post on the main highway to Jordan and Syria.

BEIRUT (AP) — A wave of tit-for-tat kidnappings between rival Islamic militant groups in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo risks sparking large-scale internal fighting between rebels after clashes killed at least four militants earlier this week, activists said Saturday.

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Serbian police say Predrag Danilovic, who played for the Miami Heat and Dallas Mavericks, is seriously injured after being stabbed in a fight.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Officials in Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's office say the governor will meet with representatives from the National Transportation Safety Board and Connecticut's two U.S. senators at the site of a Metro-North Railroad crash that injured 70 people.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Conservative religious lawmakers in Afghanistan blocked a law on Saturday that aims to protect women's freedoms, with some arguing that parts of it violate Islamic principles or encourage women to have sex outside of marriage.

By Erika Solomon BEIRUT (Reuters) - The United States chided Russia for sending missiles to the Syrian government as plans for a peace conference promoted by Washington and Moscow were hit by diplomatic rifts over its scope and purpose. Sectarian bloodshed in neighboring Iraq during Friday prayers, a hacking attack on a Western newspaper by sympathizers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and defiant comments by a rebel commander filmed eating a slain soldier's flesh were all reminders of how the two-year-old civil war is metastising. ...

BAGHDAD (AP) — Gunmen killed the entire family of an anti-terrorist policeman in Baghdad and a Sunni cleric in the Shiite-majority south on Saturday, part of a wave of attacks across Iraq that left eight dead, said officials.

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian activists say that a wave of tit-for-tat kidnappings between rival Islamic militant groups in the northern city of Aleppo risks sparking large-scale internal fighting between rebels.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is calling attention to his economic proposals and efforts to expand the middle class.

By Agnieszka Flak JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Operations at a chrome mine in South Africa owned by chemicals group LANXESS have been suspended since Thursday after workers started an illegal strike over bonus payments, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) said on Saturday. The dispute at the mine in Rustenburg, 120 km (70 miles) northwest of Johannesburg, adds to growing labour tensions around South Africa's platinum belt, which are set to intensify over looming job cuts and wage talks in the sector. ...

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian police angered by the kidnapping of seven colleagues by Islamist gunmen kept a crossing into the Gaza Strip closed again on Saturday, stranding hundreds of Palestinian travellers, witnesses said. The protest began on Friday when police strung barbed wire across the Rafah border post and chained up the gates, local residents said, a day after the abductions. Gunmen demanding the release of jailed Islamist militants had seized seven policemen and soldiers on a road between the Sinai towns of el-Arish and Rafah. ...

MOSCOW (AP) — Wrestling's governing body has approved new rule and constitutional changes aimed at modernizing the sport and keeping it in the Olympics after 2016.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi authorities say gunmen have broken into the house of an anti-terrorism police officer in the southern suburbs of Baghdad, killing five people including him and his sleeping family.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday appointed former Dutch development minister Albert Gerard Koenders as U.N. special envoy for Mali and head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the West African country. Ban said Aichatou Mindaoudou Souleymane of Niger would replace Koenders as head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Ivory Coast. Souleymane is currently deputy envoy for the African Union and U.N. peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Koenders was the Dutch minister for development cooperation between 2007 and 2010 before he took up the Ivory Coast role in 2011. ...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — O.J. Simpson's former lawyer defended himself point-by-point Friday against allegations he botched the former football star's armed-robbery trial, after giving damaging testimony that Simpson actually knew his buddies had guns when they went to a hotel room together to reclaim some sports memorabilia.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Former Olympics champion Poul-Erik Hoyer has pledged to improve the image of badminton after winning the presidency of the sport's world governing body.

ADEN (Reuters) - Gunmen shot dead a senior Yemeni military intelligence officer who had been targeted for assassination by al Qaeda-linked militants, a local security official said. Colonel Abdullah al-Rabaki was walking home in the city of Mukalla in Hadramawt Province late on Friday when the gunmen shot him six times with a revolver fitted with a silencer, the official said. They escaped on a motorbike. Leaflets from Islamist militants allied to al Qaeda had previously been circulated in the city on Yemen's south coast, calling for Rabaki's assassination, the official said. ...

By Hereward Holland JUBA (Reuters) - Sudan's foreign minister said on Friday neighbour South Sudan had promised him it would not let rebels operate across their shared border, defusing a row that had threatened a key oil deal. The countries, which fought one of Africa's longest civil before a 2005 peace deal, agreed in March to resume cross-border crude exports and defuse tensions that have plagued them since South Sudan's secession in 2011. ...

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Motorcycle-riding gunmen assassinated a police chief in front of his house after he led an anti-Taliban campaign in western Afghanistan, an official said Saturday.