The U.S. closed its embassy in Syria and Britain recalled its ambassador to Damascus on Monday in a new Western push to get President Bashar Assad to leave power and halt the murderous grind in Syria - now among the deadliest conflicts of the Arab Spring.

Iranian authorities have arrested several people over alleged links to the British Broadcasting Corporation's Farsi-language service, Iran's semiofficial Mehr news agency reported Monday.

A federal judge for the first time in U.S. history heard arguments Monday in a case that could determine whether animals enjoy the same constitutional protection against slavery as human beings.

The person killed in a propane gas explosion outside a remote Northern California training base was the wife of a U.S. Marine, and the two people seriously injured were a Navy corpsman and his wife, military officials said on Saturday.

A 24-year-old jailed for more than three months in the deaths of his mother and brother was a free man Saturday after prosecutors said they would instead charge a high school friend accused in a string of serial killings.

The right-wing extremist who has admitted killing 77 people in the worst peacetime massacre that Norway has ever seen told a court Monday that he deserves a medal of honor for the bloodshed and demanded to be set free.

Tributes poured in to Queen Elizabeth II on Monday as she marked 60 years on the throne with a message vowing to continue serving the British people.

Flowers, teddy bears and candles piled up Monday in a southern Polish park where a mother buried her baby and then sparked a nationwide search by falsely claiming she had been kidnapped.

Lawmakers who came to Washington demanding budget cuts face a tough test now that President Barack Obama and military leaders want to shrink the force, shut down bases and cancel weapons to achieve them.

A strong earthquake in the central Philippines killed at least five people Monday as it destroyed buildings and triggered landslides that buried dozens of houses, trapping residents. At least 29 people were missing.

A second term for President Barack Obama would allow him to expand his replacement of Republican-appointed majorities with Democratic ones on the nation's appeals courts, the final stop for almost all challenged federal court rulings.

When Dorothy Twinney first saw a Race for the Cure walk for breast cancer — "a sea of pink" traveling through her hometown of Plymouth, Mich. — she was so moved she sat in her car and wept.

For the first time in nearly two decades of escalating tensions over Iran's nuclear program, world leaders are genuinely concerned that an Israeli military attack on the Islamic Republic could be imminent.