An al-Qaida front group is claiming responsibility for a weekend attack in the heart of Baghdad that killed 12 people.

Today, it's a sprawl of luxury vacation homes where Egypt's wealthy play on the white beaches of the Mediterranean coast. But 2,000 years ago, this was a thriving Greco-Roman port city, boasting villas of merchants grown rich on the wheat and olive trade.

Japan has confirmed the nation's first case of a new gene in bacteria that allows the microorganisms to become drug-resistant superbugs, detected in a man who had medical treatment in India, a Health Ministry official said Tuesday.

They say money can't buy happiness. They're wrong.

A Japanese researcher who found a way to give adults cells certain characteristics of embryonic stem cells, a process scientists say could eventually lead to cures for spinal cord injuries and other ailments, has been awarded the Balzan Prize for biology.

A Japanese court on Monday convicted two members of the environmental group Greenpeace of stealing whale meat they claim was intended for illegal consumption.

BP PLC said the blowout preventer that failed to stop oil from spewing into the Gulf of Mexico was removed from the company's well on Friday afternoon.

A thumbnail-sized clam blamed for clouding the azure bays of Lake Tahoe high in the Sierra Nevada has now turned up in a mountain-ringed Adirondack lake renowned for its limpid, spring-fed waters.

An Indonesian volcano that was quiet for four centuries shot a new, powerful burst of hot ash more than 10,000 feet (three kilometers) in the air Friday, sending frightened residents fleeing to safety for the second time this week.

Pushed by an ill-timed trough of low pressure, Hurricane Earl is heading uncomfortably close to an area relatively few hurricanes tend to go: the Northeast coastline.

The recipient of a rare double hand transplant says he feels "fantastic" and can wiggle fingers on both his new hands.

India has widened its security crackdown, asking all companies that provide encrypted communications -- not just BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion -- to install servers in the country to make it easier for the government to obtain users' data. That would likely affect digital giants like Google and Skype.

The U.N.'s climate chief says poor countries are right to expect that any funding they receive to combat global warming be kept separate from development aid or poverty relief.

A Hawaiian plant species thought to be extinct has been found on the Big Island.

Sophisticated computer models that replaced instinct with cold, hard math have helped forecasters predict where a storm like Hurricane Earl is going about twice as accurately as 20 years ago.

Greenpeace said about 500,000 Facebook users have urged the world's largest online social network to abandon plans to buy electricity from a coal-based energy company for its new data center in the U.S.

A Tasmanian devil named Cedric, once thought to be immune to a contagious facial cancer threatening the iconic creatures with extinction, has been euthanized after succumbing to the disease, researchers said Wednesday.

India should protect its elephant population by securing its wildlife reserves, curbing poaching and restricting development in the corridors they use to travel between forested areas, a panel recommended.

Thousands of villagers returned to their homes along the ash-covered slopes of an Indonesian volcano that exploded after four centuries of dormancy, even though officials warned they could be putting their lives at risk.