Corporations and shoppers in the United States spent more than $54 million in 2007 on carbon offset credits, but where exactly is that money going?

A group of prisoners filed a class-action lawsuit contending that corrections officers have systematically beaten restrained inmates in prisons throughout Georgia.

A woman accused of leaving her children with little food and no money while she traveled to Nigeria to marry a man she met on the Internet has been charged with child endangerment and child abandonment.

President Bush signed legislation intended to prevent the severely mentally ill from buying guns, in a rare bipartisan agreement with the Democratic-led Congress after the shooting massacre last April at Virginia Tech.

Shares of the Countrywide Financial Corporation plunged 28.4 percent after it denied rumors that it was planning to file for bankruptcy protection.

KB Home, the large home builder, said that its fourth-quarter loss swelled as the housing slowdown led to fewer sales and lower revenue.

President Bush arrived in Israel on a trip intended to overcome deep skepticism by Israelis and Palestinians about a negotiated peace.

Three Americans were part of a well-armed gang that waged a gun battle with soldiers and police officers in Rio Bravo on Monday, Mexican authorities said.

An unnamed official disputed the authenticity of a video showing Iranian speedboats near an American convoy.

Sderot, Israel, a working-class town less than two miles from Gaza, has been repeatedly hit with rockets.

American commanders believe it is essential to hobble the extremists in order to sustain recent security gains and ultimately pacify Iraq.

The move came after the president unilaterally appointed key cabinet positions, which also set off riots across the country.

In France and other parts of Europe, some Orthodox church groups refuse to return to a union with the church leadership in Moscow.

Nathaniel Travers, who operated last year in Afghanistan, said Tuesday that his comrades appeared to have needlessly killed civilians after their convoy was attacked by a suicide car bomb.

Sohail Qureshi, a London dental technician who was arrested at Heathrow Airport in 2006 boarding a flight to Pakistan, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in the first conviction under a new law against planning terrorism. The prosecutor said Mr. Qureshi, originally from Pakistan, planned a “two- to three-week operation” either in Pakistan or Afghanistan, possibly against Western troops. He was carrying nearly $18,000, a telescopic night sight and a computer hard drive loaded with militant Islamic tracts, the court was told. Prosecutors said that he had trained with jihadist groups in Pakistan linked to Al Qaeda and that his skills included encrypting e-mail messages. The court was also told of e-mail exchanges he had with Samina Malik, known as the “lyrical terrorist,” who received a suspended sentence in November for keeping a library of terrorist material. Ms. Malik, a clerk at a Heathrow newsstand who wrote poetry limning her passion for Islamic militancy, received an e-mail message from Mr. Qureshi asking about security arrangements at Heathrow. According to the prosecution, she replied, “The airport security is as tight as ever.”.