SEATTLE — Fabio Heuring was standing outside a Seattle nightclub on a Saturday night and smoking cigarettes with a friend when a man bolting from a bouncer ran into them. The enraged man ripped off his shirt in the middle of the street and prepared to give Heuring’s buddy a beating.
SIRTE, Libya (AP) — Moammar Gadhafi’s fighters beat back an attempt by Libya’s new government Friday to crush remnants of the old regime, forcing revolutionary troops into retreat in the mountains and turning Gadhafi’s seaside hometown into an urban battlefield of snipers firing from mosques and heavy weapons rattling main boulevards.
WASHINGTON — Is there ever really a good time for the president to go on vacation? President Barack Obama’s summer getaway to Martha’s Vineyard has reignited a seemingly annual debate. Given the demands of the job and the always-looming possibility of an unexpected crisis at home or abroad, the political perils of a presidential vacation never seem to go away. This summer, the vacation dilemma is compounded by the country’s urgent demand for jobs, the debt crisis that’s left Washington with a hangover and the public’s frustration with political gridlock.
LONDON — Thousands more police officers flooded London streets Tuesday in a bid to end Britain’s worst rioting in a generation as nervous shopkeepers closed early and some residents stood guard to protect their neighborhoods. An eerie calm prevailed in the city, but unrest spread across central and northern England on a fourth night of violence driven by poor, diverse and brazen crowds of young people.
BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian security forces backed by tanks and snipers launched a ferocious assault Sunday on defiant cities and towns, killing at least 70 people and possibly many more as the regime raced to crush dissent ahead of Ramadan. Corpses littered the streets after a surge in violence that drew widespread international condemnation.
LONDON (AP) — Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioner resigned Monday, a day after his boss also quit, and fresh investigations of possible police wrongdoing were launched in the phone hacking scandal that has spread from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to the British prime minister’s office.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The outgoing commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan said Monday that the focus of the war will shift in coming months from Taliban strongholds in the south to the eastern border with Pakistan where insurgents closest to al-Qaida and other militants hold sway.
LONDON — Hundreds of thousands of British teachers and public sector workers swapped classrooms and offices for picket lines Thursday in what unions hope will be the first salvo in a summer of discontent against the Conservative-led government’s austerity plans.