International

ISRAEL-GAZA BORDER – Israeli tanks and ground troops moved swiftly Sunday to seize large sections of Gaza, encircling its largest city and cutting the narrow strip of land in two in what military officials called a "real war" on the militant Islamic group Hamas.

JERUSALEM – The Israeli military extended its air campaign in the Gaza Strip on Monday, and the nation's defense minister warned that the country is in "war to the bitter end against Hamas" and allied militants, who control the Palestinian territory.

JERUSALEM – Israel on Sunday began preparing for a possible ground offensive into the Gaza Strip as its air force continued to pummel the Hamas-controlled region with dozens of new missile strikes in an operation that has killed nearly 300 Palestinians in two days.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Pakistan is moving some troops away from its border with Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said Friday, sparking renewed fears that last month's terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, could trigger a fourth war between the two countries, both of which are now armed with nuclear weapons.

WASHINGTON – Gulf War illness is a real medical condition that has affected at least 175,000 combat veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, according to a report released Monday.

WASHINGTON – A year after problems emerged in the construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, another State Department post being built largely by the same Kuwaiti-based company is engulfed by delays, recriminations and an inspector general's probe, according to U.S. officials.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents on Monday rejected an offer of talks from Kabul and threatened for the first time to strike a target in the West, suggesting many years of violent conflict to come.

WASHINGTON – An American Muslim subjected to several years of intense FBI scrutiny and questioning about links to terrorism has been held without charges, access to a lawyer or contact with his family for nearly three months by the security services of the United Arab Emirates.

BAGHDAD – The Iraqi parliament approved legislation Monday that allocates six seats in provinces to small ethnic and religious communities in the upcoming provincial elections, but Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks asked for the law to be overturned on the grounds that they remained underrepresented.

WASHINGTON – A CIA-led raid on a compound in eastern Syria killed an al-Qaida in Iraq commander who oversaw the smuggling into Iraq of foreign fighters whose attacks claimed thousands of Iraqi and American lives, three U.S. officials said Monday.

BAGHDAD – If Iraq doesn't sign a new agreement governing American forces in Iraq, the United States will withdraw $6.3 billion in aid for construction, security forces and economic activity, and another $10 billion a year in foreign military sales.

DONGGUAN, China – So many industrial zones cram into this area of the Pearl River Delta region, nicknamed "factory to the world," that provincial leaders not long ago came up with a scheme to get rid of some less-desirable plants to free up space.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – More extremist attacks shook Pakistan on Monday on the heels of a devastating bomb attack on the capital's best-known hotel. Gunmen took the Afghan consul general hostage after killing his driver, and suicide bombers killed nine policemen at a checkpoint in the valley of Swat, northwest of the capital.

Jenny Jacques wants to tie a yellow ribbon around every tree in America.

BAGHDAD – A woman wearing a suicide vest blew herself up Monday at a coming-home party for an Iraqi police sergeant detained by U.S. forces for almost a year, killing 22 people and wounding 33, a high-ranking official said.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Pakistani troops opened fire Monday on U.S. forces who were trying to enter the country's lawless tribal area, local officials said. The report, if accurate, would mark a dangerous further deterioration in relations between the allies in the war on terrorism.

WASHINGTON – Iranian stonewalling has stalled a U.N. investigation into whether Iran conducted nuclear weapons research, according to a new U.N. nuclear watchdog report that for the first time raised the possibility that foreign experts may have assisted in Iranian nuclear experiments.

NAIROBI, Kenya – President Robert Mugabe's 28-year grip on Zimbabwe loosened slightly Monday with a deal that makes his archrival, Morgan Tsvangirai, the prime minister, but there are major doubts that the complicated power-sharing arrangement will end the southern African nation's economic crisis.

BEIJING – A scandal over tainted infant formula spread Monday as authorities acknowledged that thousands of babies ingested milk powder laced with the chemical found in contaminated pet-food exports last year that caused scores of U.S. animals to die.

FRESNO – Central Valley gang enforcers are using a new weapon: deportation orders.

BAGHDAD – Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Monday there would be no security agreement between the United States and Iraq without an unconditional timetable for withdrawal – a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which insists the timing for troop departure would be based on conditions on the ground.

BAQOUBA, Iraq – The 15-year-old girl had the chubby cheeks of a child who hadn't lost her baby fat when she was arrested Sunday by an alert policeman. Around her chest was a vest packed with explosives.

BEIJING – How much is an Olympic medal worth?

IGOETI, Georgia – Despite assurances that it would withdraw troops from Georgia starting Monday, the Russian military operated with impunity as its forces moved convoys in and out of the city of Gori and plowed through a police roadblock in this town some 25 miles northwest of Tbilisi, the capital.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Pakistan's beleaguered President Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally, on Monday received a direct violent threat from al-Qaida while his political opponents convened parliament to begin impeachment proceedings against him.

BAGHDAD – On Monday, King Abdullah II of Jordan became the first Arab head of state to visit Iraq since Saddam Hussein's regime fell in 2003.

WASHINGTON – Although oil traders on Monday shrugged off Russia's widening invasion of neighboring Georgia, the conflict, if it spreads farther, could threaten nearly 1 million barrels per day of needed global crude supplies from the Caspian Sea, most of it bound for Europe.

GORI, Georgia – Russia pressed its invasion of Georgia by land, sea and air for a third day Sunday, striking far beyond contested South Ossetia as the Kremlin brushed aside a cease-fire offer and disputed Georgia's claim to have pulled its forces out of the rebel enclave.

WASHINGTON – World powers agreed Monday to toughen U.N. sanctions against Iran after Tehran failed to accept by the weekend deadline a proposal aimed at resolving the crisis over its nuclear program, the State Department said Monday.

BAGHDAD – Ghania Jassim moved out of her Baghdad apartment in 2003 when her husband had to choose between paying the soaring rent after the U.S. led-invasion or feeding their five children and her.

MINATITLÁN, Mexico – Pungent smoke billows from aging petrochemical plants here. Foul-smelling bluish water gathers in pools outside the walls. Fading paint announces the creaky Lázaro Cárdenas refinery, a perfect metaphor for one of the world's biggest and most antiquated state oil companies.

Twice a week in Sacramento's Pocket area, a dozen preschoolers at Bergamo Montessori School make friends in Mandarin.

BAGHDAD – Female suicide bombers targeted religious pilgrims in Baghdad and Kurdish political protesters in Kirkuk on Monday in a jarring reminder of the sectarian conflicts that nearly ripped Iraq apart.

BAGHDAD – The U.S. military said Sunday that the three people killed last month after U.S. soldiers shot at their car in one of the most tightly secured areas of Iraq were civilians, not criminals as the military initially reported.

AABEY, Lebanon – The skinny young brothers fidgeted in their plastic chairs as they gazed up at the beefy killer soaking in his first days of freedom after nearly three decades in Israeli prison.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Describing a systematic government campaign to decimate the people of Darfur, the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor on Monday charged the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, with genocide and war crimes and called for his arrest.

Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones saw the horrors of the Iraq war firsthand, including the site where his fellow Marines allegedly killed 24 women, children and other civilians at Haditha. So when he returned to Kings County in the southern San Joaquin Valley, got drunk and drove a stolen pickup into someone's living room, family and friends blamed the psychological effects of war, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – A suicide bomber marked the first anniversary of the military operation against Islamabad's radical Red Mosque by targeting police guarding the site, killing at least 15 people.

This is the home of Sinaloa Surf Adventures, an all-levels school and camp that celebrates the soothing harmony of the ocean and the immutable force of its waves. People come here to surf, and invariably restore their kinship with the sea.

MADAIN, Iraq – A U.S.-allied Iraqi city council member sprayed American troops with gunfire Monday, killing two soldiers and wounding three and an interpreter, Iraqi authorities and witnesses said. The attack occurred minutes after they emerged from a weekly joint meeting on reconstruction in this volatile town southeast of Baghdad.

KABUL, Afghanistan – American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock. The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram Air Base was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

WASHINGTON – Although Defense Department officials deny that detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or in other American camps were routinely mistreated, official statements and court testimony undercut the claim:

BAGHDAD – Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, foe of the United States' presence in Iraq, announced a strategy Sunday for influencing Iraq's fall elections, including backing independents, technocrats and tribal figures.

They found themselves alone, lost and drifting further away in the lukewarm waters above the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

BEIRUT, Lebanon – As opposition and pro-government militias traded gunfire in northern Lebanon Monday, the Christian-led Lebanese armed forces, long touted as perhaps the country's last truly national institution, offered little resistance to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and its Shiite allies.

BAGHDAD – There's a place in this city, amid the snarled checkpoints and mazes of blast walls, where families still gather for picnics, teenage boys kick soccer balls, young couples canoodle furtively under trees and children bury their faces in cotton candy.

BAGHDAD – The U.S. military said Monday that it had killed 45 militants in two days of fierce fighting in northeast Baghdad, while four U.S. soldiers were killed Monday in rocket or mortar attacks in Baghdad.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants Americans traveling to Israel to make sure they are immunized against measles.

Chinese President Hu Jintao will get hundreds – or perhaps thousands – of postcards from Sacramento-area Buddhists and friends who are planning a peace rally Wednesday in the Rose Garden in Capitol Park.