AP - Men are forced to grow beards. Women can't leave home without a male relative. Music, movies and watching sports on TV are banned. Limbs are chopped off as punishment, and executions by stoning have become a public spectacle.

AP - The Betty White phenomenon keeps getting bigger.

AP - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday inaugurated the country's first domestically built unmanned bomber aircraft, calling it an "ambassador of death" to Iran's enemies.

AP - A gunbattle erupted between Mexican police and gunmen near the Rio Grande on Saturday, killing one person and prompting U.S. authorities to close a highway that runs along the border in El Paso, Texas.

AP - A 14-year-old Dutch sailor departed in secrecy from Gibraltar Saturday on her quest to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world — avoiding the media because, her manager said, she didn't want the attention.

AP - Modoc County is wedged into California's far northeastern corner, a land apart from much of the rest of the nation's most populous state.

AP - Move over Martha Washington. Martha Stewart and Michelle Obama are getting space in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington for the first time.

AP - A few weeds have popped up on the fairways, and summer's heat has scorched the grass here and there, but the golf course at the Hampshire Country Club is still tidy and scenic, its little waterfall still burbling through the rocks.

AP - President Barack Obama had a simple task for his first morning on vacation: shoot over to a Martha's Vineyard bookstore to fill out his daughters' summer reading list and grab himself a novel.

AP - Two Iowa farms that recalled more than a half-billion eggs linked to as many as 1,300 cases of salmonella poisoning share suppliers of chickens and feed as well as ties to an Iowa business routinely cited for violating state and federal law.

AP - It would take "a complete failure" of the Iraqi security forces for the U.S. to resume combat operations there, the top American commander in Iraq said as the final U.S. fighting forces prepared to leave the country.

AFP - Egypt on Sunday stepped up the search for a Van Gogh painting valued at 55 million dollars stolen in broad daylight from a Cairo museum where the surveillance cameras and alarms had long been defunct.

AP - Four U.S. troops were killed in fighting in eastern and southern Afghanistan on Sunday, and a former guerrilla leader who battled Soviet invaders decades ago was killed by a roadside bomb in the country's north.

McClatchy Newspapers - NEW YORK — There's no shortage of opinions — or theatrics — at the site of a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks from where the World Trade Center stood before two hijacked jetliners crashed into its twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

AP - The old man stepped carefully through his village, dodging craters as deep as graves where they had been mining soil for embankments to hold back the floodwaters. Already, nearly half this village of tenant farmers had been destroyed. The crops wiped out.

AP - A bear that mauled to death a caretaker was euthanized Saturday at the request of the family of the victim, whose father said he had told his son to leave the job.

AP - Philip Rivers doesn't ease up, even in a meaningless exhibition game.

AP - Alabama will start this season where it ended last season. The Crimson Tide is on top. Coach Nick Saban has the Tide rolling the way Bear Bryant did in his day, first in The Associated Press preseason poll for the first time since 1978.

AP - Two Iowa farms that recalled more than a half-billion eggs linked to as many as 1,300 cases of salmonella poisoning share suppliers of chickens and feed as well as ties to an Iowa business routinely cited for violating state and federal law.

AP - Iraq's deputy justice minister has acknowledged the convicted killer of British aid worker Margaret Hassan has escaped from prison.

AP - For months, the U.S. government talked with a boot-on-the-neck toughness about BP, with the president wondering aloud about whose butt to kick.

AP - The Republican National Committee's $5.5 million in July receipts includes a $900,000 insurance payment, helping boost anemic fundraising by the national party.

AP - Trucks rumbled into Iran's first reactor Saturday to begin loading tons of uranium fuel in a long-delayed startup touted by officials as both a symbol of the country's peaceful intentions to produce nuclear energy as well as a triumph over Western pressure to rein in its nuclear ambitions.

AP - As the White House eagerly highlights the departure of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, the small army of American diplomats left behind is embarking on a long and perilous path to keeping the volatile country from slipping back to the brink of civil war.

AFP - Doubles from Nicolas Anelka and Salomon Kalou helped Chelsea continue their flying start to their Premier League title defence with a 6-0 thrashing of Wigan at the DW Stadium on Saturday.

AFP - A 23-year-old Chinese man who contracted the AIDS virus as a boy through a blood transfusion and who has since campaigned for the rights of AIDS sufferers has been detained, activists said Saturday.

AP - Two Iowa farms that recalled more than a half-billion eggs linked to as many as 1,300 cases of salmonella poisoning share suppliers of chickens and feed as well as ties to an Iowa business routinely cited for violating state and federal law.

AP - Swedish prosecutors defended their handling of a rape allegation against the founder of WikiLeaks, saying Sunday that they had made no mistakes in issuing an arrest warrant and withdrawing it less than a day later.

AFP - Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in an interview published Sunday he believed the Pentagon could be behind a rape allegation against him that was swiftly dropped by Swedish authorities.

AP - None of the alarms and only seven out of 43 surveillance cameras were working at a Cairo museum where a Vincent van Gogh painting was stolen, Egypt's top prosecutor said Sunday.

Reuters - Newly ubiquitous "Golden Girls" actress Betty White won the fifth Emmy of her career on Saturday for hosting an episode of "Saturday Night Live," while fellow screen veteran Ann-Margret got a standing ovation after receiving her first statuette.

Reuters - China has to pursue political reform to safeguard its economic health, Premier Wen Jiabao said during a visit to the booming town of Shenzhen, the official Xinhua news agency reported.