AP - Oil prices plunged in a massive sell-off Monday, briefly falling below $120 a barrel for the first time since early May after Tropical Storm Edouard appeared unlikely to threaten oil and natural gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico.

AP - Six major world powers agreed Monday to seek new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program after the country failed to meet a weekend deadline to respond to an offer intended to defuse the dispute, the United States said.

AP - President Bush's agenda in Asia this week is front-loaded with trouble on the continent: nuclear worries, political repression, recovery from natural disaster.

AP - Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman is in a hospital in Memphis, Tenn., on Monday after being seriously injured in a car accident near his home in Mississippi.

AP - Barack Obama put forward a broad energy plan Monday designed to end U.S. reliance on imported oil within 10 years and shore up his standing amid a tightening White House race and high-anxiety over gas prices.

AP - Tropical Storm Edouard took aim at Texas' Gulf coast at the height of tourist season Monday, threatening to pick up strength from warm Gulf waters and gain near-hurricane speeds before a projected landfall a day later.

AP - Consumer spending, after adjusting for inflation, fell in June as shoppers were hit with the second biggest increase in prices in nearly three decades.

AFP - Nobel prize-winning Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who shone a light on brutal Soviet Gulag camps, has died at the age of 89 and global tributes were made on Monday.

AFP - China's Olympic run-up stuttered again Monday as it reported that terrorists killed 16 policemen in the nation's far northwest, while pollution returned to fill athletes' lungs in Beijing.

Reuters - Israel said on Monday it would transfer to the occupied West Bank dozens of pro-Fatah Palestinians who fled the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip after clashes with the Islamist group, reversing a decision to send them home.

Reuters - A Pakistan army helicopter began airlifting frost-bitten survivors from the slopes of K2 on Monday, leaving behind at least 11 dead climbers after an ice fall near the top of the world's second highest mountain.

Reuters - South Korean activists said on Monday they planned a large candlelight rally to protest U.S. President George W. Bush's visit on Tuesday and demand the two countries scrap a widely criticized beef import deal.

Reuters - Indian authorities on Monday ordered a probe into possible organizational lapses that led to a stampede outside a mountaintop Hindu temple in northern India, killing at least 145 pilgrims.

Reuters - Iran will speak to the representative of six world powers on Monday over its disputed nuclear program, but will press ahead with atomic work despite a demand to halt, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Reuters - The fifth tropical storm of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season formed near a major oil and gas producing area of the northern Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.