Bee Nation/World News

The battle scars of the revolution that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak's regime continue to define the Egyptian landscape.

CAIRO – Egyptians who stood in Tahrir Square 15 months ago demanding a revolution spent Friday stunned and shattered as the first democratic election rejected their calls, instead producing a runoff between one candidate who wants an Islamic-based state and another who promises a return to the deposed regime.

U.S. residential property values are up for the first time since July 2011, according to a new report by Oxford, Miss.-based real estate tracker FNC Inc.

In the birthplace of deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, where his pristine picture once hung over the bridge that welcomes visitors and residents know the Mubarak family by name, Shedya Abdel Aziz bravely announced Thursday that she had voted for someone other than Mubarak's branded heir apparent, Ahmed Shafiq, in this week's presidential election.

The pleasure boats sit idle on the Nile, the hotels are empty and the magnificent temples have precious few admirers these days.

The Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA in the hunt for Osama bin Laden was sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason Wednesday, officials said, in a further blow to relations between Islamabad and Washington.

Even for a president who has lost some of his luster, donor-rich California remains a generous state.

NATO leaders on Monday adopted President Barack Obama's exit strategy from the nearly 11-year-old U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan, cementing an "irreversible" pullout of foreign combat troops that will leave Afghan security forces with the leading role in combat operations by the summer of 2013.

Support for Egypt's Islamist political parties has plummeted ahead of the country's presidential election next week, a Gallup survey released Friday has found, while early returns showed the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, thought to be Egypt's dominant political group, running third among Egyptians voting overseas.

U.S. presidents have long sought relief from battles inside the Beltway and have entertained visiting heads of state at Camp David, the presidential retreat nestled in a mountain range in nearby Maryland.

The financially besieged European Union embarked on an uncertain path Tuesday, with a new president in France and a call for new elections in Greece, developments that are certain to change the way Europe handles its economic crisis.

The State Department said Tuesday that documents to allow Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng to come to the U.S. had been completed, and Chen himself talked to lawmakers on Capitol Hill from his hospital room to describe the brutal treatment of his relatives by Chinese authorities.

House Speaker John Boehner set the stage Tuesday for another tense, partisan showdown over tax and spending policy later this year, as he vowed to insist on big spending cuts before he will agree to a new debt ceiling – much like last summer's debt showdown debacle – and he also promised a vote before November's elections on whether to prevent Bush-era tax cuts from expiring at year's end, as scheduled.

The cost of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan is about to rise by $365 million annually under an agreement that would reopen a key NATO supply route through Pakistan that's been closed for nearly six months.

Along the Israel-Egypt border a barrier is being built among the desert dunes.

Walk through the modern new document depository in Medley, Fla., and one thing becomes clear: Paper can be a hard habit to break.

After hours of sharp, partisan debate Thursday that's likely to be echoed around the nation this election year, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives approved, with no Democratic support, a federal budget plan that would slash popular domestic programs while sparing defense.

The political world absorbed a chilling message Wednesday from the fall of Washington icon Sen. Richard Lugar: Rabid partisanship is popular, especially in Republican primaries, and cutting deals with political opponents is not.

It was supposed to be introducing the team whose savvy grass-roots work will sway Latino voters to the Republican Party in six very different battleground states. Instead, the Republican National Committee demonstrated Tuesday how far behind it is in persuading Latino voters to pick former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama.

A wider, deeper Panama Canal will open in 2014, meaning that bigger cargo ships filled with more containers of consumer goods can move directly to the population centers of the East Coast instead of stopping on the West Coast and sending the goods across the country.

More than 200,000 letters from Bank of America will begin landing in homeowners' mailboxes this week, the bank said Tuesday, offering principal reduction as part of the $25 billion mortgage settlement announced in February.

The five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks used their weekend war court appearances to stage "peaceful resistance to an unjust system" being used for political reasons, defense lawyers said Sunday – a day after the defendants turned the judge's plans to hold a simple arraignment into a 13-hour marathon of prayer and protest.

Young consumers in today's China, while facing a constantly changing economic landscape, are reaping the benefits of their giant nation's continuing rise, and they seem well aware of it.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish initials as the PRI, ruled Mexico for 71 consecutive years before it lost the presidency 12 years ago.

Malaika Brooks was seven months pregnant when a Seattle police officer stunned her with a Taser. Hawaii resident Jayzel Mattos was at home when she, too, got zapped by police.

French and Greek leaders who backed the European Union's severe austerity measures are likely to take a drubbing when both countries hold national elections Sunday, raising pressures on EU leaders to ease the tough fiscal constraints they adopted to head off the euro crisis.

Will the world be tapping methane hydrates deep in the permafrost and off the edges of continents for future energy needs decades from now? Part of the answer will rest with research in Alaska.

It's not every day that NASA descends on your backyard, hunting for clues to extraterrestrial life.

In the deadliest outbreak of violence in weeks, at least 11 protesters were killed and at least 150 wounded early Wednesday outside the Defense Ministry in Cairo in clashes with civilian attackers, putting Egypt's presidential election and already-fragile democratic transition in further turmoil.

Twitter didn't exist the last time the Federal Trade Commission examined alcohol advertising, back in the last decade.

President Barack Obama told Americans Tuesday that after more than a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nation "can see the light of a new day."

BEIJING – The daring escape of a legal activist from extrajudicial house arrest apparently to American diplomatic protection is likely to force U.S. and Chinese officials to confront a subject this week that both sides have approached only cautiously in recent years: China's abysmal record on human rights.

Here, in rugged terrain owned by the American public, a little-known federal agency called Wildlife Services has waged an eight-year war against predators to try to help an iconic Western big-game species: mule deer.

Thousands of non-target animals – wild and domestic – have been mistakenly killed by one of the most lethal tools in Wildlife Services' arsenal: spring-loaded metal cylinders that are baited with scent and fire sodium cyanide powder into the mouth of whatever tugs on them.

Made from galvanized aircraft cable, neck snares are one of Wildlife Services' most widely used tools. But that popularity comes with a catch: Neck snares are also indiscriminate, kill in grim fashion and pose a special danger to golden eagles.

A year ago, U.S. Navy SEALs slipped into a heavily fortified compound in Pakistan and killed the face of international terrorism. There is growing fear, however, that Osama bin Laden's death didn't even seriously wound the international terror threat.

After the Bosnian war, tens of thousands of Muslims who'd been driven from their homes by Serb forces during nearly four years of fighting returned to reclaim their property. Many of the returnees repaired and sold their homes, then left for good – but not Vedad Karic.