The Obama administration is considering nominating retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as the next commander of the U.S. European Command, a move that could stir controversy among some senior military officials who have clashed with Lute over war policy.

SAO PAULO, Brazil — It just made sense to be in South America’s economic heart, Jonathan Rosenthal reasoned, no matter that he had been working on Wall Street with some of the investment world’s most heady firms.

KABUL — At least five Afghan police officers and two civilians were killed Sunday when a car bomb was detonated outside the main police headquarters in Kandahar, officials said.

An additional 19 people, six of them police officers, were wounded in the blast, provincial officials said. Children also were among the victims.

In his first extended public appearance as CIA director, David H. Petraeus this week did more than display his well-known discipline for staying on message. He did his best to bring other government voices back on message as well.

Open intelligence hearings on Capitol Hill are never completely open. Lawmakers and witnesses try to stick to what’s safe to say in public, without disclosing details on espionage operations or what’s happening behind the scenes in Washington.

A study released Friday has shaken up much of what we thought we knew about malaria.

The number of people who die annually of the tropical disease is roughly double the current estimate, according to the report, published in the science journal Lancet. Additionally, many of malaria’s victims are now believed to be adults, overturning the previous belief that adults almost never die of the disease.

As Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered an impassioned anti-Israel speech Friday, a smaller fight played out between the two countries over a tablet commercial.

In the teaser, a bored agent for Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, is shown watching TV on his Samsung tablet while in Isfahan, south of Tehran. After the agent begins conversing about the features of the tablet with several Iranian “women” (actually men from an Israeli TV show), one of them presses on the tablet and accidentially blows up a nearby uranium enrichment plant.

Update, 11:51 p.m.: The two American tourists have been released The women were not immediatebly identified, but Egyptian officials said they were age 60 and 65.

Two female tourists and their Egyptian tour guide Friday were intercepted by gunmen and kidnapped in the southern part of the Sinai peninsula, The Post’s Ernesto Londono reports.