AP - Pakistani forces bombarded suspected militant hideouts with mortar shells Saturday as the government launched a major offensive against Taliban fighters threatening the main city in the country’s volatile northwest, officials said.

AP - Zimbabwe’s state-run newspaper said Saturday that turnout for the country’s presidential runoff was massive and “a slap in the face for detractors” although a foreign observer said many who voted only did so out of fear.

AP - There hasn’t yet been any official North Korean reaction to the destruction of the most visible symbol of its nuclear program, but a U.S. diplomat who witnessed it said Saturday that the big blast saddened government officials there.

AP - Severe storms with strong winds swept through the Plains on Friday, forcing swimmers practicing for U.S. Olympic trials in Omaha to flee pools and run for cover, killing two teenagers in Iowa, and knocking out power to thousands.

AP - A heroic effort by hundreds of townspeople, volunteers and National Guardsmen to hold back the Mississippi River failed Friday undone by a burrowing muskrat.

AP - The National Rifle Association sued the city of San Francisco on Friday to overturn its ban on handguns in public housing, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a handgun ban in the nation’s capital.

AP - The goal to raise levees and build large-scale flood defenses around this flood-torn city could be delayed indefinitely because of congressional demands that Louisiana chip in $1.8 billion to the effort over three years.

AP - Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, who became one of the wealthiest civil lawsuit attorneys in the country by taking on tobacco, asbestos and insurance companies, was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for conspiring to bribe a judge.

AP - Cathy Campbell did a double-take and tapped the brakes when she spotted what appeared to be a pointy-edged box lying in the road just ahead.

AP - A Michigan man was sentenced to 43 years in prison Friday for driving the wrong way on an interstate and slamming his pickup truck into a minivan, killing a Maryland mother and four children who were returning home from a Christmas trip.

AP - A millionaire convicted of helping his wife keep two Indonesian housekeepers as virtual slaves was sentenced Friday to more than three years in prison, ending a trial that shed light on the often little-seen exploitation and abuse of domestic workers.

AP - A police officer who body-slammed an unarmed woman and broke her jaw during a medical call to a suburban restaurant last year was arrested Friday and charged with civil rights violations.

AP - The Nintendo DS isn’t just fun and games anymore for English students at Tokyo’s Joshi Gakuen all-girls junior high school. The portable video game console is now being used as a key teaching tool, breaking with traditional Japanese academic methods.

AP - Sony says it will start a movie download service for its PlayStation 3 home console this summer in the U.S.

AP - Oracle Corp. finished its fiscal year with an impressive flourish, then pulled out a wet blanket.

AP - Within the rumbling, stumbling hunk of junk that is WALL-E beats the sweetest, warmest heart a robotic representation of humanity’s highest potential.

AP - Smart phone maker Research In Motion Ltd.’s fiscal first-quarter profit and revenue more than doubled, fueled by strong sales of its BlackBerry devices, but the company’s forecast for the current period sent its shares down nearly 8 percent.

PC World - Shaolin Temple, regarded as the site where Chinese martial arts originated, has opened an online store on Alibaba.com’s Taobao…

Macworld.com - SoftRAID has announced the release of an update to its eponymous RAID software for Mac OS X, SoftRAID. The new 3.6.7 update is a free upgrade for all 3.x users; SoftRAID costs $129 to download ($149 on CD).

AP - China’s fast-growing number of mobile phone accounts has risen more than 8 percent since the start of the year to 592 million, while demand for traditional fixed-line service is falling, a state news agency reported Thursday.

AP - Roadside bombs killed four U.S. soldiers in northern Iraq, the military said Wednesday, in a spike of violence that pushed to at least 10 the number of Americans who have died here this week.

AP - President Robert Mugabe faced deeper international isolation Wednesday, with African states demanding that a discredited runoff election be postponed and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela rebuking the Zimbabwe leader for the first time.

AP - Nelson Mandela said Wednesday there had been a tragic failure of leadership in Zimbabwe in his first public comments about the country’s political crisis.

AP - For many Zimbabweans, the chief worry is not political violence or President Robert Mugabe’s iron hold on power. It’s out-of-control inflation that puts anything more than a single daily meal beyond reach.

AP - North Korea is expected this week to turn over its long-delayed accounting of its nuclear weapons activities, part of a chain of events leading to a unique photo opportunity: the destruction of the cooling tower at Pyongyang’s main reactor.

AP - A top European critic of the Guantanamo Bay detention center said Wednesday that the next U.S. president should set a fixed timetable for closing down the controversial camp.

AP - Israel will keep Gaza border crossings closed another day in response to Palestinian rocket fire that had violated a new cease-fire, the Defense Ministry said late Wednesday.

AP - A Canadian judge said in a ruling Wednesday that the U.S. military’s treatment of a teenage detainee at Guantanamo Bay violated international laws against torture.

AFP - China urged the international community to do more to end violence in war-torn Darfur, saying Thursday it had done all it could to end a worsening humanitarian situation there.

AFP - North Korea was expected to finally deliver an overdue account of its nuclear activities Thursday, the next step in years of international talks to get the secretive country to abandon atomic weapons.

AP - President Robert Mugabe faced deeper international isolation Wednesday, with African states demanding that a discredited runoff election be postponed and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela rebuking the Zimbabwe leader for the first time.

AP - For many Zimbabweans, the chief worry is not political violence or President Robert Mugabe’s iron hold on power. It’s out-of-control inflation that puts anything more than a single daily meal beyond reach.

AP - North Korea is expected this week to turn over its long-delayed accounting of its nuclear weapons activities, part of a chain of events leading to a unique photo opportunity: the destruction of the cooling tower at Pyongyang’s main reactor.

AP - Saudi authorities arrested 701 suspected al-Qaida-linked militants in 2008, some of whom planned a car bomb attack on an oil installation, the Interior Ministry said Wednesday.

AP - Pakistan’s new government gave its strongest commitment yet on containing Islamic militancy, vowing Wednesday to prevent attacks on Afghanistan but insisting foreign forces would not be allowed to operate on Pakistani soil.

AP - The Supreme Court on Wednesday outlawed executions of people convicted of raping a child.

AP - Sales of new homes tumbled for the sixth time in seven months in May while median prices kept plunging, underscoring the depth of the nation’s housing woes.

AP - The House is to vote Wednesday on extending relief to more than 20 million taxpayers in danger of getting hit by the alternative minimum tax this year, setting up a war of wills with the Senate on how to deal with an unpopular levy that many believe must be stopped in its tracks.

AP - An employee shot and killed a supervisor and four others after an argument at a western Kentucky plastics plant in a rampage that ended in the gunman’s suicide, police and a company official said Wednesday.

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AP - Violence-wracked Zimbabwe needs United Nations peacekeepers to help prepare the way for new elections, the country’s opposition leader said in a call from his haven at the Dutch Embassy.

AP - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are updating Teddy Roosevelt’s admonition to speak softly and carry a big stick. The Fed policymakers are starting to raise their voices while brandishing the stick even though they don’t appear ready to use it.

AP - A roadside bomb killed three American soldiers and an interpreter north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Wednesday, and Iraqi police reported 14 Shiite gunmen were arrested after fighting south of the capital.

AP - Coalition airstrikes killed 22 militants who were attacking two towns in eastern Afghanistan, and explosions killed two more foreign soldiers in the south, officials said Wednesday.

AP - An employee shot and killed four people at a plastics plant before killing himself early Wednesday, police said.

AP - House Democrats resurrecting a measure to punish price gouging and curb oil market speculation said Tuesday they will block Republican calls for expanded offshore drilling, an idea gaining popularity with gasoline costing $4 a gallon.

AP - A massive foreclosure rescue bill cleared a key Senate test Tuesday by an overwhelming margin, with Democrats and Republicans both eager to claim election-year credit for helping hard-pressed homeowners.

AP - One of the girls who became pregnant at Gloucester High School this year denied Tuesday there was any pact among them to have children, saying instead they decided to help each other make the best of their situations.

AP - Republican John McCain said Tuesday the federal government should practice the energy efficiency he preaches, pledging as president to switch official vehicles to green technologies and do the same for office buildings.

AP - In less than a day, an electrical storm unleashed nearly 8,000 lightning strikes that set more than 800 wildfires across Northern California a rare example of “dry lightning” that brought little or no rain but plenty of sparks to the state’s parched forests and grasslands.

AP - Dozens of scared children filed silently into the bare room, their eyes on the cracks in the floor. One by one, in low voices, they told of being tortured by the Kenyan army because they were suspected of aiding rebels. They told of being beaten and made to shake hands with corpses. They told of being forced to crawl through barbed wire tunnels and of genitals squeezed by pliers.

AP - Wireless systems used by many hospitals to keep track of medical equipment can cause potentially deadly breakdowns in lifesaving devices such as breathing and dialysis machines, researchers reported Tuesday in a study that warned hospitals to conduct safety tests.

AP - Firefighters from neighboring states arrived to help Monday after an “unprecedented” lightning storm sparked more than 800 wildfires, from Big Sur to wine country to Humboldt County.

AP - With a few days to go before the last stretch of the bloated Mississippi River reaches its crest, people toiled around the clock Monday to reinforce levees already strained and saturated from the pressure of the rising water.

AP - An autistic man who could barely speak and had wandered off without medicine for his transplanted kidney likely had just hours to live when he was found after a week in the woods, a doctor said.

AP - The city’s mayor said Monday there is no evidence a group of young girls made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together, seeking to dispel an explosive theory put forth by the high school principal.

AP - A man whose life was turned upside-down by a wrongful arrest and weeks in jail should have been given access to a lawyer sooner so he could have shown the arrest was erroneous, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday.

AP - The third trial of an alleged member of a swingers club accused of forcing children into sex shows was postponed Monday amid allegations that the foster father to the young victims molested other children.

AP - When floodwaters knocked out the water treatment plant in Mason City, Iowa, FEMA rolled into town and promptly set up an account with a Pepsi bottler to supply bottled water. Then FEMA officials moved into a vacant store and began handing out the stuff.

AP - A man who led police to the charred remains of his two children was charged with capital murder on Monday.

AP - Having lost her job and her three-bedroom house, Darlene Knoll has joined the legions of downwardly mobile who are four wheels away from homelessness.

AP - A man suspected of shooting a police officer was killed in a gunfight with police on a crowded California freeway early Monday, ending a daylong manhunt that started near Disneyland.

AP - A man accused of shooting a pregnant teller during a bank robbery and causing her to lose the twins she was carrying was charged Monday with two counts of killing a fetus, among other charges.

AP - Attorneys for a former American Indian Movement activist accused of murdering another member of the group in 1975 must be allowed to conduct DNA tests on the victim’s underwear, a federal magistrate judge has ruled.