worldheadlines

On your marks. Get set. Watch! For many sports fans, New Year's Day was made for lounging around the living room and watching college football with a bag of potato chips in hand. This year, they can get rewarded for their laziness. The ESPN Zone Ultimate Couch Potato Competition is being held Tuesday at the ESPN Zone restaurant in Times Square.
Four...

A Florida man was about halfway through a plate of steamed clams when he chomped down on something hard — a rare, iridescent purple pearl.
George Brock and his wife, Leslie, had been spending a day at the beach Friday in South Florida and stopped at Dave's Last Resort & Raw Bar...

NEW YORK - Jessica Simpson is in the early stages of recording a country album in Nashville, a project slated for a 2008 release via Columbia Records.
Simpson said she had always wanted to make a country album, but was waiting until the right time.
"I think there is a strength in female...

NEW YORK - What's gonna happen Wednesday night?
That's the sort of question seldom raised about late-night talk TV, whose hosts keep the audience content with variations on a durable formula, night after night, gag after gag, guest after guest.
But the late-night landscape is about to change, and no one -- not...

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. - Richard Hamilton scored 22 points and Chauncey Billups added 13 points and 12 assists, helping the Detroit Pistons rout the Milwaukee Bucks 114-69 Monday for their ninth straight win.
The 45-point margin of defeat was the third-worst in Bucks history, trailing a pair of 48-point losses. The Pistons have won 17 of 19, including a franchise-record 15 wins...

FORT WORTH, Texas - Stuck on the sideline for disciplinary reasons, DeSean Jackson and Robert Jordan could do nothing to help as California quickly fell behind by three touchdowns.
"They were chomping at the bit to get in," coach Jeff Tedford said. "They were prancing around on the sideline. And so when...

EL PASO, Texas - Jonathan Stewart set a Sun Bowl record with a career-high 253 yards rushing and Justin Roper threw four touchdown passes in his first start as Oregon beat South Florida 56-21 on Monday.
The Ducks (9-4) scored 28 straight points in the third quarter to snap a four-game postseason...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani electoral officials will decide on Tuesday whether to go ahead with a Jan. 8 poll, with expectations it will be delayed by up to two months after Benazir Bhutto's killing plunged the country into crisis.
Election Commission Secretary Kanwar Dilashad told reporters that a decision on the timing would be announced on Tuesday, but a recommendation "has been...

BAGHDAD - The second half of 2007 saw violence drop dramatically in Iraq, but the progress came at a high price: The year was the deadliest for the U.S. military since the 2003 invasion, with 899 troops killed.
American commanders and diplomats, however, say the battlefield gains against insurgents such as al-Qaida in Iraq offer only a partial picture of where the...

NAIROBI, Kenya - Kenya's president threatened a tough crackdown Monday as rioters rampaged for a third day to protest what they called his sham re-election -- a bloody convulsion threatening what has been East Africa's most stable and prosperous democracy.
At least 135 Kenyans were reported killed in violence that flared from...

WASHINGTON - The United States provided a steady stream of intelligence to Benazir Bhutto about threats against her before the former Pakistani prime minister was assassinated and advised her aides on how to boost security, although key suggestions appear to have gone unheeded, U.S. officials said Monday.
Senior U.S. diplomats had multiple...

HANDING IT OVER: NASA grudgingly released some results Monday from an $11.3 million federal air safety study it previously withheld from the public.
DIFFICULT ANALYSIS: It published the findings in a format that made it cumbersome for any thorough analysis by outsiders.
EARLIER INDICATIONS: People who had seen the results have said they would show that events like near-collisions and runway interference occur...

NASA's comet-busting spacecraft is on its way to rendezvous with another comet in an extended mission that will also hunt for Earth-sized planets around a cluster of stars. The Deep Impact probe zipped past Earth Monday, the first of three flybys designed to use the planet's gravity to hurtle the spacecraft toward comet Hartley 2 for a 2010 meeting.
Last week, engineers...

The US drug safety watchdog warned Monday on its website that several Chinese-made 'dietary supplements' contain the active ingredient found in Viagra, and could be harmful to consumers.
"The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is advising consumers not to buy or use Super Shangai, Strong Testis, Shangai Ultra, Shangai Ultra X,...

A 30-year-old woman infected with a hard-to-treat form of tuberculosis is recovering at a Bay Area hospital, as health officials search for dozens of international air passengers who may have come in contact with her as she traveled back from India.
The woman, who authorities declined to identify, arrived in San Francisco Dec. 13 aboard an American Airlines flight that she boarded...