AFP - Residents and tourists evacuated coastal areas of Australia's Queensland state as officials warned a looming monster cyclone could be 'deadly' in a region already ravaged by flooding.

AFP - Grieving New Zealanders wept and hugged Tuesday, as the nation fell silent to mark the moment last week when an earthquake tore apart Christchurch and claimed hundreds of lives.

Reuters - Yoko Hashiguchi and her toddler fled Tokyo after a deadly earthquake and tsunami devastated northeast Japan and triggered a nuclear disaster at a power plant 240 km (150 miles) away.

Reuters - A U.S. government agency took a step closer to blowing up a Mississippi River levee to control flooding on Saturday after a court decision cleared the way for it to proceed.

Reuters - Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, extradited to the Netherlands from Serbia Tuesday after 16 years on the run, will face genocide charges at the U.N. war crimes tribunal within days.

Reuters - The case against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was charged with sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper, is near collapse, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

AFP - Syrian forces have killed nearly 140 people including at least 100 when the army stormed the flashpoint protest city of Hama to crush dissent on the eve of Ramadan, activists have said.

Reuters - Factory output in the U.S. central Atlantic region contracted again this month and new home sales fell to a five-month low in July, adding to signs of a weak second-half economic expansion at best.

Reuters - U.S. campaign finance watchdogs challenged the tax-exempt status on Wednesday of four political groups raising millions of dollars in largely unregulated 'outside money' to influence elections, terming claims they promote social welfare 'nonsense.'

AP - U.S. intelligence indicates that the top al-Qaida bomb-maker in Yemen also died in the drone strike that killed radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, two U.S. officials said Friday.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has threatened the euro zone with a new crisis with his shock announcement that he will hold a referendum on the last-minute bailout deal struck only last week to try to contain the bloc's debt mountain.

AP - Adele scored six Grammy nominations on Wednesday, including for record, song and album of the year, but the owner of the 2011's best-selling album with '21' wasn't the night's top nominee — and that wasn't the evening's only surprise.

Reuters - U.S. authorities are preparing to charge four former Credit Suisse Group AG employees with criminal and civil fraud related to write-downs on subprime mortgage derivatives at the height of the financial crisis, sources familiar with the matter said.

The Christian Science Monitor - Congress this week plunged into fray over new Obama administration rules that will require religious employers to offer birth control in their health-insurance programs, even if contraception runs afoul of their religious doctrines.