Bundesliga leaders Bayern Munich will be without Germany striker Mario Gomez and French midfielder Franck Ribery for Saturday's visit of Freiburg, the club announced Friday. The pair picked up injuries in Bayern's 3-2 defeat at Fiorentina on Tuesday which saw them qualify for the last eight of the Champions League on away goals: Gomez has a torn calf while Ribery is out with an ankle injury.

Togo's opposition leader announced plans on Friday to stage a new protest march against the disputed re-election of President Faure Gnassingbe. "We shall show that we have the people behind us and that . . . we shall fight to free our country from a system that seeks to extinguish it and prevent it from blossoming," Jean-Pierre Fabre told AFP.

European Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton will next week be urged to lodge a formal protest over "widespread fraud" during the Iraqi election count. "I'll be providing my edited dossier to the parliament and to Baroness Ashton's office on Wednesday," said Struan Stevenson, the conservative Scottish chairman of the EU parliament's delegation for relations with Iraq.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's bloc has a slender lead over its rivals in the mainly Shiite southern Iraqi province of Muthanna, partial election results showed on Friday. The results showed that Maliki's State of Law Alliance garnered around 15,000 votes in the province, ahead of the Iraqi National Alliance, a coalition led by Shiite religious parties, with 11,000 votes.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's bloc has a slender lead over its rivals in the mainly Shiite southern Iraqi province of Muthanna, partial election results showed on Friday.

Niger's junta on Friday banned its own members and also government ministers from standing in elections, in a decree signed by its chief, Major Salou Djibo, state radio reported. "Ineligibility applies particularly to the president of the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy (CSRD, the junta) and its members," said the decree read out on La Voix du Sahel.

Dutch labour party chief and former finance minister Wouter Bos said Friday he will not contest the June 9 snap election after the collapse of the government over military policy in Afghanistan. "I will not propose myself as a candidate for the lower chamber, nor at the head of the list nor as a member of parliament," the 46-year-old told a news conference.

Prosecutors in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam have launched an inquiry into the use of proxy votes in municipal elections, as a recount got underway on Thursday. The investigation began after a candidate from the populist right-wing Leefbaar Rotterdam urged other candidates from his party to acquire as many proxy votes as they could for the March 3 poll.

The Kurdistania alliance, made up of the Kurdish autonomous region's two long-dominant parties, was in the lead in the Iraqi province of Arbil, an election official told AFP on Thursday.

The African Union's commissioner for peace and security on Thursday commended Guinea on "very positive" progress towards constitutional order and elections following a military coup. "Things are going very positively," Commissioner Ramtane Lamamra told AFP after a meeting of the AU Peace and Security Council at AU headquarters in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.