VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI stressed the church's opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday, pressing the Vatican's case with the US leader who is already under fire on those issues from some conservative Catholics and bishops back home.
ITALY - Leaders of the G8 developed nations have pledged $20bn (£12bn) for efforts to boost food supplies to the hungry, on the final day of a summit in Italy. The investment, which is $5bn more than had been expected, will fund a three-year initiative to help poor nations develop their own agriculture.
USA - The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp is gearing up to handle a large number of bank failures expected as a result of bad mortgages, both in residential and commercial real estate, an economist said Tuesday.
USA - Joe Jackson suspects "foul play" may have been involved in the sudden death of his son, Michael Jackson, he told USA - ABC News in an exclusive interview.
WASHINGTON - The Federal Reserve on Thursday launched a robust defense of its independence and warned that efforts in Congress to put monetary policy under political sway would hurt the economy. Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn said opening up some of the US central bank's most sensitive decisions to political scrutiny could result in higher long-term interest rates and hurt the United States' credit rating.
WASHINGTON - El Nino's back. Government scientists say the periodic warming of water in the tropical Pacific Ocean that can affect weather around the world has returned.
JERUSALEM - Israel must have "tremendously powerful" weapons to deter a nuclear attack or destroy an enemy that dares to launch an atomic strike, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted on Thursday as saying.
UK - The latest swine flu figures show that 14 people have died in the UK after contracting the virus. Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson said the figure does not mean they all died as a direct result of swine flu but that they had the virus.
AUSTRALIA - James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that 'anthropogenic global warming' is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a 'first-world luxury' with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book.
SOUTH KOREA - South Korea has been hit by a third wave of cyber attacks with the government laying the blame directly on its Communist neighbour. The country's spy agency said it suspected North Korea was behind the series of attacks that have triggered website outages in South Korea and the United States.
WASHINGTON - A proposal from a long-time congressional foe of the Federal Reserve that could give lawmakers sway over monetary policy has won the support of a majority in the House of Representatives, alarming officials at the US central bank.
LOS ANGELES - Scientists have detected a spike in underground rumblings on a section of California's San Andreas Fault that produced a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 1857.
BEIJING - China surpassed the United States as the world's biggest auto market for the first half of 2009 after June sales soared 36.5 percent from a year earlier, according to data reported Thursday.
IRELAND - It's official, the Irish will head to the polls again in October for a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, the deal that would see the European Union's biggest reform in years. The move follows a German court decision last week paving the way for the treaty's ratification.
UK - The Bank of England is expected to keep interest rates at their historic low of 0.5% on Thursday. But it may announce an extension of its quantitative easing scheme under which it prints money to buy bonds in order to stimulate the economy.