AP - Republican John McCain said Tuesday that Democrat Barack Obama is bad for business as the presidential rivals appealed to voters worried about lost jobs, rising gas prices and other economic woes.

AP - Senate Republicans blocked a proposal Tuesday to tax the windfall profits of the largest oil companies, despite pleas by Democratic leaders to use the measure to address America's anger over $4 a gallon gasoline.

AP - President Bush and European allies on Tuesday threatened tougher sanctions to squeeze Iran's finances and derail its potential pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Bush said the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger world peace.

AFP - A senior Somali Islamist leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, on Tuesday rejected a three-month truce reached between Mogadishu and its main political foes at UN-sponsored peace talks in Djibouti a day earlier.

AFP - US President George W. Bush on Tuesday looked to persuade European leaders to tighten the squeeze on Iran's finances, a central message of what was likely his farewell tour of the continent.

Reuters - Turkish warplanes attacked northern Iraq on Monday, Iraqi security officials said on Tuesday, bombing a mountainous area that is home to rebel Kurdish separatists.

Reuters - Floodwaters crashed out of a dangerously unstable "quake lake" in southwest China on Tuesday after soldiers blasted open a sluice, significantly easing the threat of disaster for hundreds of thousands of people downstream.

Reuters - A hardline Islamist leader rejected on Tuesday a U.N.-brokered peace pact signed in Djibouti by the Somali government and some opposition figures, and vowed that the war would continue.

Reuters - South Korea's entire cabinet offered to resign on Tuesday in the face of massive street protests, as its increasingly unpopular president warned that Asia's fourth-largest economy could be heading into crisis.

Reuters - The Bush administration is asking Congress for an increase of $275 million above its current budget request to enhance federal food safety programs, U.S. Health Secretary Michael Leavitt said on Monday.

Reuters - Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain share a dislike of rough-edged U.S. politics. Each tried to talk her spouse out of running for the White House.

Reuters - Economists have trimmed forecasts for U.S. growth in the second half of this year and in 2009, but more have come to the view that the United States will dodge a recession, a survey released on Tuesday showed.

Reuters - Iranian Defence Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar was quoted on Tuesday as warning Israel of a "very painful" response if it launched a military strike over the Islamic Republic's disputed nuclear program.

AP - Tori Spelling and husband Dean McDermott are parents again.