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AP - Russian troops held their position in the key town of Gori and were digging in deeper in other strategic areas of Georgia on Friday, the day that Russia’s president said a pullback would be complete.

AP - Iraq and the U.S. pushed close to a deal Thursday setting a course for American combat troops to pull out of major Iraqi cities by next June, with a broader withdrawal from the long and costly war by 2011.

AP - Pakistani leaders were meeting Friday to discuss differences that threaten to tear apart their shaky ruling coalition, a day after twin suicide blasts killed scores outside Pakistan’s largest arms factory.

AP - The North African branch of al-Qaida claimed responsibility Friday for a devastating pair of attacks in Algeria that killed at least 55 people, in a statement carried by an Arab news station.

AP - At the Russian-controlled roadblocks around Gori, the deadpan soldiers are firm but restrained, searching cars and checking identification, but not too rigorously.

AFP - Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has admitted he is interested in signing Aston Villa midfielder Gareth Barry.

AP - Two boats carrying members of a U.S.-based activist group left Cyprus for Gaza early Friday to try and break Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory.

AP - Chile’s lower house of congress has suspended plans to boost a $1,626 gasoline subsidy for each of its members.

AFP - Nigerian gunmen abducted six top officials of a government oil agency in the southwestern Ondo state but released them after a few hours, police said Friday.

AP - The United States is concerned about two prominent Chinese human rights activists who went missing just before and during the Beijing Olympics, an embassy spokeswoman said Friday.

AP - An Aboriginal leader said Friday he wants a boomerang to return to Australia more than 300 years after it was taken as a souvenir by celebrated British explorer Capt. James Cook.

AP - Intel Corp. cracked the lid Tuesday on a new chip design that is at once a big challenge to smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and an admission that AMD nailed a key design feature before it slipped into a severe financial slump.

AP - Hewlett-Packard Co.’s fiscal third-quarter profit jumped 14 percent, beating Wall Street’s expectations, as strong laptop sales and a robust international presence lifted the technology bellwether.

AP - Erin O’Brien and her friends are do-it-yourself investors.

AP - A federal judge Tuesday lifted a gag order on three MIT students who were barred from talking publicly about security flaws they discovered in the state’s automated mass transit fare system, even as a lawyer for the agency acknowledged the system was “compromised.”

AP - A man barged into the Arkansas Democratic headquarters and opened fire Wednesday, fatally shooting the state party chairman before speeding off in his pickup. Police later shot and killed the suspect after a 30-mile chase.

AP - A woman who grew to be 7 feet, 7 inches tall and was recognized as the world’s tallest female died Wednesday, a friend said. She was 53.

AP - When police finally searched the squat white mobile home where they say a man held his family captive for three years, the place was so filthy and bug-infested that one officer had to wear a gas mask and another refused to continue.

AP - Georgian troops retreated from the breakaway province of South Ossetia on Sunday as their U.S.-allied government ordered a cease-fire and pressed for a truce, overwhelmed by Russian firepower in a conflict that threatened to set off a wider war.

AP - A reef of gold buried beneath this vast, parched grassland arcs across some of the world’s poorest countries. Where the ore is rich, industrial mines carve it out. Where it’s not, the poor sift the earth.

AP - Iraq’s foreign minister insisted Sunday that any security deal with the United States must contain a “very clear timeline” for the departure of U.S. troops. A suicide bomber struck north of Baghdad, killing at least five people including an American soldier.

AP - Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was jailed Thursday for a bond violation in his perjury case, his pleas for leniency rejected by a judge who made it clear the mayor would get no special treatment.

AP - After a long day battling one of Northern California’s most stubborn wildfires, dozens of weary firefighters gathered in a remote wilderness clearing near the fire’s front lines to get a chopper ride back to camp.

AP - Mayor Cheye Calvo got home from work, saw a package addressed to his wife on the front porch and brought it inside, putting it on a table.

AP - A woman who took in a family recovering from Hurricane Katrina was arrested and charged with kidnapping Thursday after authorities said she refused to return five children to their mother and went on the run with them for a month.

AP - A Connecticut family is convinced that the mysterious man accused of kidnapping his daughter in Boston and wanted for questioning in the 1985 disappearance of a California couple was a German student who lived with the family decades ago.

AP - The wife of evangelical pastor Joel Osteen shoved a flight attendant during an in-flight tantrum over a stained seat, a fellow crew member testified Thursday at a civil trial over the incident.

AP - A sport utility vehicle packed with illegal immigrants rolled over Thursday on a rural highway southeast of Phoenix, killing nine people and injuring the other 10 on board, authorities said.

AP - An illegal immigrant from Honduras who claimed his treaty rights were violated when he was arrested for a robbery-murder near Dallas was executed Thursday evening.

AP - A bar worker at a popular Times Square karaoke club was arrested Thursday after confessing to beating a woman to death with a pipe on the club’s roof during an argument, police said.

AP - A commercial fisherman is charged with poaching thousands of spiny lobsters with traps that damaged coral reefs and sea grasses in sensitive marine waters, in a case that spotlights an ongoing problem off the Florida coast.

AP - Luisa Lopez says no one asked about her age when she started working at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant. She was 17, and within days she was on a fast-moving poultry production line, wielding a long, sharp pair of scissors.

AP - A Michigan man has pleaded guilty to sex abuse after being accused of wearing a “World’s Greatest Dad” shirt to meet for sex with someone he thought was a 14-year-old-girl.

AP - President Bush said Wednesday that North Korea has much to do before the U.S. can remove it from the terror blacklist, but expressed hope that its pariah status as a member of the “axis of evil” could some day be a thing of the past.

AP - Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

AP - Eleven people, including a U.S. Secret Service informant, have been charged in connection with the hacking of nine major retailers and the theft and sale of more than 41 million credit and debit card numbers, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

AP - The Olympic flame approached the final destination of its long and sometimes contentious global tour Wednesday, greeted by rapturous crowds in the Chinese capital two days before it officially launches the Summer Games.

AP - A woman said a man suspected of opening fire on a group of young adults, killing three, had raped her the night before in the same northern Wisconsin woods where the victims were slain.

AP - In the small-town dinner-theater mystery, Bruce Hummel had no trouble admitting he was the killer: “I got my revenge,” he told the audience. “Tell that to the sheriff.” Now he faces a murder charge in real life.

AP - Seven years after anthrax-laced letters terrorized an already frightened nation, a new suspect suddenly emerged in the public eye this week. But he was gone just as quickly, committing suicide before he could be charged with murder and adding another dramatic twist to the bizarre episode.

AP - Officials at a small Civil War museum made an intriguing discovery while sifting through storage: A document long treated as a photo reproduction of the terms of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender appears, upon closer inspection, to contain actual signatures and date to 1865.

AP - Jenny the elephant lazily poked her trunk into a bucket of fruit as her keepers at the Dallas Zoo hosed her during her morning bath, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she could soon be shipped far from her home of 22 years. She’s also certainly unaware of the debate her possible departure has stirred.

AP - It was another perfect summer day so similar to and yet so different from that day a year ago when the Minneapolis freeway bridge fell.

AP - For days before Danieal Kelly died in a fetid, airless room made stifling hot by a midsummer heat wave the bedridden teenager begged for something to drink until she could muster only one word: water.