For Muslims around the world, Eid al-Adha is a time of celebration, marked with visits from far-flung relatives, gift-giving and elaborate feasts.
But this year, the joyous occasion was marred with bomb blasts and deaths in violence-plagued Afghanistan and Iraq, and in civil war-wracked Syria.
In eastern Afghanistan, a bomb placed under a stage killed the governor of Logar province as he was delivering an Eid speech inside a mosque.
In addition to Gov. Mohammad Arsala Jamal, the blast killed 15 others, police said.
In Iraq, at least eight people were killed and 19 others wounded when a bomb exploded outside a mosque in central Kirkuk, Iraqi officials said.
The bomb went off as worshippers were leaving the mosque, police said.
And in Syria, where a bloody civil war continues to claim lives daily, three children were killed in an explosion that anti-government activists blamed on President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

At least 13 people were killed when Typhoon Nari pounded the Philippines over the weekend, the country's disaster management agency said.

The typhoon struck the country's north Saturday, displacing more than 43,000 people in 11 provinces, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said.

The deaths reported were due to falling trees, electrocution, mudslides, drowning and collapsed structures, it said. Three fishermen remain missing, and 1,900 passengers are stranded at different ports.

he latest chapter in Amanda Knox's long legal battle begins Monday in Florence, Italy, with a retrial over the 2007 killing of her British roommate Meredith Kercher.

But Knox, 26, who has expressed concern about returning to a country where she spent four years behind bars, will not be in the court.

She was convicted in 2009 of murdering Kercher, a 21-year old British exchange student who was found stabbed to death in November 2007 in the villa the two young women rented in the central Italian university town of Perugia.

The convictions of Knox and her ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were overturned in 2011 for "lack of evidence."

After her acquittal, Knox returned to her hometown of Seattle where she has been living since.

But Italy's Supreme Court decided last year to retry the case, saying the jury that acquitted Knox didn't consider all the evidence, and that discrepancies in testimony needed to be answered.

A court in eastern China sentenced Bo Xilai - the former rising star of the ruling Communist Party who fell from power amid a scandal involving murder, betrayal and financial skullduggery - to life in prison Sunday after being found guilty on charges of bribe-taking, embezzlement and abuse of power.