Revelers swing lanterns during the ecumenical festival celebrating Catholic St. Martin and Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, in Erfurt, Germany. They gathered at the town's cathedral square Monday.

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MEXICO CITY — An attorney who has defended bankers and businessmen in some of Mexico's highest-profile cases rose to the powerful post of interior secretary Monday after a mysterious plane crash killed the government's No. 2 leader.

President Felipe Calderón said he chose Fernando Gomez-Mont because the former lawmaker can build support in Congress for security reforms fortifying his fight against the nation's powerful drug cartels.

Mexico's interior secretary is the most powerful political figure after the president, the equivalent of a vice president and domestic security chief combined.

Gomez-Mont pledged to oversee an efficient and strong security Cabinet to confront increasingly violent drug cartels.

"We are committed to getting rid of the violence that is happening across the country," he told reporters.

KIGALI — Thousands protested in Rwanda's capital Monday over Germany's arrest of a senior official wanted by France in connection with the presidential assassination that preceded the African nation's 1994 genocide.

Rose Kabuye, chief of protocol for Rwandan President Paul Kagame, was arrested at an airport in Frankfurt Sunday because France wants to question her about the 1994 plane crash that killed then-President Juvenal Habyarimana. The assassination led to 100 days of genocide that killed more than a half-million Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus

Rwanda's Tutsi-led government and genocide survivor organizations have often accused France of training and arming the Hutu militias and former government troops who led the genocide.

Kabuye's lawyer, Lef Forster, said his client denied any involvement in the April 6, 1994, attack.

Kabuye is expected to be extradited to France.

BRUSSELS — The European Union decided Monday to resume major economic and political negotiations with Moscow that were frozen after the Russian invasion of Georgia.

EU foreign ministers overruled objections from Lithuania, which claimed that Russia continues to violate the EU-brokered peace deal that ended the Georgian war in early August.

France, which holds the EU presidency, had pushed hard to relaunch the talks in an effort to improve relations with Moscow.

Russia threatened last week to deploy short-range missiles close to the Polish and Lithuanian borders in response to U.S. plans for anti-missile installations in eastern Europe.

The negotiations are expected to cover issues ranging from counterterrorism cooperation to greater European access to Russia's lucrative energy sector.

ROME — Railway and mass transit workers in Italy staged a strike Monday, creating chaos for commuters, while a wildcat protest by some of Alitalia's staff forced the national airline to scrap dozens of flights.

Roads were jammed as many people took cars or motor scooters to work instead of public transportation. The walkout by railway and transit workers was meant to push the government and transport companies to open contractl negotiations.

Alitalia said it didn't have an official count of how many flights had been cut, but the airport's Web site listed at least 50 international and domestic departures as being canceled Monday.

MOGADISHU — Gunmen firing automatic weapons dragged two Italian Roman Catholic nuns from their home in rural Kenya on Monday and drove them into lawless Somalia, officials said.

The nuns — Maria Teresa Olivero, 60, and Caterina Giraudo, 67 — were working on hunger and health programs in the northeastern town of El Wak, about six miles from the Somali border.

The early-morning abduction began when six gunmen firing automatic weapons hurled a hand grenade and fired a rocket at Kenyan police, said Aden Mohamed Isaqm, a local aid worker. The gunmen then seized the nuns and drove them to the border.

In Italy, the missionary movement of the two nuns said efforts were under way to contact the kidnappers and negotiate the captives' release.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Want Botox but don't have the bucks?

Not a problem in beauty-obsessed Rio de Janeiro — at least if you don't mind a trainee doing the work.

The Brazilian Society of Esthetic Medicine is offering free Botox injections and several other beauty treatments to those earning less than $250 a month.

Spokeswoman Isabel Alvarez says the program lets student doctors get experience and gives the poor a chance for luxury treatments.

Also offered are laser hair or acne removal, chemical skin peels and more.

Alvarez says the program has operated sporadically since 1998. This year's 10-day program started Monday.

ERLIN — Germany's top Nazi hunter on Monday asked Munich prosecutors to request the extradition of an 88-year-old Ohio man accused of bearing responsibility for the deaths of 29,000 Jews at a concentration camp in Poland.

Kurt Schrimm, head of the special German prosecutors' office that has hunted Nazis since 1958, said he believes transport lists of prisoners that arrived at Sobibor during John Demjanjuk's seven-month tenure at the camp can be used as evidence of his alleged involvement in their deaths.

"We believe that it's enough," Schrimm said. "We believe that we will get a trial."

Munich prosecutors were asked to file the extradition request because Demjanjuk lived there briefly after the war.

Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker who emigrated to the United States in 1952, denies involvement in war crimes, saying he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war when he was captured by Germany in 1942.

A native of Ukraine who settled in suburban Cleveland, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986, when the U.S. Justice Department believed he was the sadistic Nazi guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp.