AP - Drinkers at an Outback watering hole may have wondered if perhaps they'd had one too many when they were greeted by a crocodile at the pub's door.

AP - A British man convicted of shooting to death his 9-month-old baby and wife as they cuddled together in bed showed no reaction Thursday as he was sentenced to two life prison terms without the opportunity for parole.

AP - A suicide bomber attacked a meeting of pro-government Sunni sheiks west of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 20 people. The U.S. military acknowledged coalition casualties but did not say how many.

AP - President Robert Mugabe on Thursday said he is open to talks with the opposition, which is boycotting Friday's runoff because its leader says state-sponsored violence has made it impossible to take part.

AP - Stocks plunged Thursday as Wall Street contended with a barrage of bad news: another surge in oil prices and warnings of trouble in the key financial, automotive and high-tech industries. The major indexes showed losses of about 2 percent, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which shed more than 300 points and dropped to its lowest level in nearly two years.

AP - President Bush on Thursday lifted trade sanctions against North Korea and moved to remove it from the U.S. terrorism blacklist, a remarkable turnaround in policy toward the communist regime he once branded as part of an "axis of evil."

AP - Americans can keep guns at home for self-defense, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in the justices' first-ever pronouncement on the meaning of gun rights under the Second Amendment.

AFP - US police arrested 389 people on child sex trafficking charges in a major sweep across several states, The New York Times reported Thursday.

AFP - North Korea was expected to finally deliver an overdue account of its nuclear activities Thursday, the next step in years of international talks to get the secretive country to abandon atomic weapons.

Reuters - Rival political activists clashed in Pakistan on Thursday as by-elections were held for five National Assembly seats and 25 provincial assembly seats and several people were wounded, police said.

Reuters - A Catholic priest said mass over the site of a capsized ferry in the central Philippines on Thursday as divers prepared to bore a hole in the vessel to speed up the retrieval of bodies.

Reuters - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday the country's "enemies" will never succeed in stopping Iran's nuclear activities, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Reuters - The U.S. Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday and signaled it was in no hurry to raise them, even as it voiced greater concern about inflation.