Bayern Munich overcame an early red card for star forward Franck Ribery to beat Cologne 3-0 on Friday and ensure it remains at least three points clear at the top of the Bundesliga before the four-week winter break.

Ribery was sent off in the 33rd minute, earning a second yellow card for grabbing at Henrique Sereno's face just half a minute after both were shown a yellow for clashing in the penalty area.

Former top-ranked tennis player Marat Safin has won a seat in Russia’s lower house of Parliament and will represent the pro-Kremlin party United Russia.

The 31-year-old Safin will be one of the youngest members in the 450-seat legislature.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. said Thursday that new phones deemed critical to the company's future will be delayed until late 2012.

Mike Lazaridis, one of the company's co-CEOs, said the BlackBerry 10 phones will need a highly integrated chipset that will not be available until mid-2012, so the company can now expect them to ship late in the year. He disclosed the delay on a conference call with analysts.

Christmas has come early to some remote islands in the western Pacific.

Care packages full of medicine, food, toys and school supplies have been raining down on dozens of tiny Micronesian islands over the past week, with "Operation Christmas Drop," the oldest ongoing U.S. Department of Defense mission in the world, in full swing.

The tsunami-devastated Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has reached a stable state of "cold shutdown" and is no longer leaking substantial amounts of radiation, Japan's prime minister announced Friday.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's announcement marks a milestone nine months after the March 11 tsunami sent three reactors at the plant into meltdowns in the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Carlos the Jackal, the flamboyant Venezuelan who symbolized Cold War terrorism, was sentenced to life in prison — again — in a Paris trial that ended late Thursday with him rallying for revolution and weeping for Moammar Gadhafi.

Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, hasn't seen freedom since French agents spirited him out of Sudan in a sack in 1994. He's already serving a life sentence in a French prison for a triple murder in 1975, the worst punishment meted out in a country that does not have the death penalty.

The founder of a leading independent weekly publication critical of authorities in the restive province of Dagestan in Russia's North Caucasus has been shot dead outside the newspaper's office, police said Friday.

Khadzhimurad Kamalov's paper Chernovik (Rough Draft) has reported extensively on police abuses in the fight against an Islamist insurgency that originated in neighboring Chechnya and has spread across Russia's Caucasus region. Kamalov founded the weekly in 2003, worked as its editor for several years and remained its publisher until his killing late Thursday.

Federal authorities blamed Lebanese financial institutions Thursday for wiring more than $300 million into the United States in a money-laundering scheme they said used the U.S. financial system to benefit Hizbullah.

The U.S. government said in the lawsuit filed in a Manhattan federal court that it seeks nearly a half-billion dollars in money-laundering penalties from some Lebanese financial entities, 30 U.S. car buyers and a U.S. shipping company. It also said it's entitled to claim their assets as forfeitable under U.S. money-laundering laws.

Three men who plotted a suicide attack against an Australian army base because they believed Islam was under threat from Western nations were sentenced Friday to more than 13 years in prison.

The men — Australian citizens originally from Somalia and Lebanon — were convicted last year of conspiring to plot a terrorist attack against Holsworthy Barracks, an army base on the outskirts of Sydney. Officials said the group planned to send a team of men with automatic rifles into the base in a bid to kill as many soldiers as possible.

The U.S. administration on Thursday placed Saleh al-Qarawi, a senior Saudi member of the Lebanon-based Abdullah Azzam Brigades, on its blacklist of global terrorists.

The move freezes any assets held by Qarawi in the United States and bans Americans from doing business with him.