AP - For all the talk about John McCain's hard-hitting politics, Barack Obama is hardly innocent.

AP - The Pentagon has ordered roughly 1,250 Marines serving as trainers for the Afghan security forces to stay on the warfront almost a month longer to continue a mission that military leaders say is a top priority, according to a senior military official.

AP - Police tightened security in China's western Xinjiang region Tuesday and Olympic organizers sought to reassure residents and visitors after a deadly attack on police heightened jitters just days ahead of the games' opening ceremony.

AP - One of the biggest mysteries surrounding the anthrax scare of 2001 — why the anthrax-laced letters were dropped off at a mailbox in New Jersey — may be connected to a sorority chapter at Princeton University.

AP - President Bush kicks off his Asian trip with a visit to a new friend while seeking solutions to sticky issues old and new.

AP - The winds were beginning to pick up and the surfs were rising in Galveston early Tuesday as Tropical Storm Edouard closed in on the Texas Gulf Coast.

AFP - Tributes poured in from around the world Monday for Nobel prize-winning Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died aged 89 after a life devoted to exposing the brutal Soviet Gulag prison system.

AFP - China's Olympic run-up stuttered again Monday as 16 policemen were killed in a grenade attack in the nation's far northwest, while pollution returned to fill athletes' lungs in Beijing.

Reuters - Consumer prices jumped at the sharpest rate in more than a quarter century during June, and consumers coping with soaring costs received their smallest income gain in a year, the government said on Monday.

Reuters - Iran and the representative of six world powers talked by telephone on Monday without resolving a row over Tehran's sensitive nuclear work, which the Islamic Republic said would not be stopped.

Reuters - Oscar-winning U.S. actor Morgan Freeman was hospitalized in serious condition on Monday after the car he was driving careened off a rural highway and rolled several times, authorities said.

Reuters - Suspected Muslim separatists with homemade bombs killed 16 police in western China on Monday, state media said, reporting one of the worst attacks by militants on Chinese soil just four days before the Olympics.

Reuters - Tropical Storm Edouard moved across the northern Gulf of Mexico on Monday and has a 20 percent chance of hitting the Texas-Louisiana coast as a hurricane, U.S. forecasters said.

Reuters - Rescuers have reached an Italian mountaineer who refused to succumb to frostbite and exhaustion on K2 after 11 other climbers perished on the world's second-highest mountain, a Pakistani guide said on Monday.

Reuters - Barack Obama proposed on Monday tapping the strategic oil reserve to help lower gas prices, a reversal of an earlier stance, and called rival John McCain a tool of big oil companies as rising energy costs took center stage in the U.S. presidential campaign.