U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that a military strike on Iran's nuclear program would not stop that country from pursuing the development of a nuclear weapon. Gates told a Senate panel that a military option would only delay Iran's nuclear ambitions and would further drive it underground, making it more difficult to monitor. Gates said the better option would be for the U.S. and its allies to convince Iran that building a nuclear program would start an arms ...

Teams in southern Japan are searching for an award-winning U.S. poet and college professor who failed to return from a hike to a volcano, his university said Thursday. Craig Arnold, a 41-year-old assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, did not return from his Monday hike to a volcano on Kuchinoerabujima, a small island just west of Yakushima, the school said. "The only clues that [searchers] have found were indications that he had begun the ascent -- footprints on the ...

Richard Phillips, the cargo-ship captain whose capture by pirates triggered a dramatic U.S. Navy rescue off the coast of Africa, called on the federal government Thursday to provide military escorts for international shipping vessels. Testifying before a key Senate committee, Phillips conceded there may not be sufficient resources to do that. He also said arming vessels' crews could deter pirates, but should only be allowed in limited circumstances. Phillips was in command of the Maersk Alabama when it was boarded ...

Facebook stopped a phishing attack on Thursday, its second day in a row of dealing with a worm on the site that lures people to a fake Facebook page and prompts them to log in. Unsuspecting Facebook users get a message from a friend urging them to "check this out" and including a link to a Web page that appears to be a Facebook log-in page, but it is a fake site that steals their information when they type in ...

After passing the 100 days benchmark, President Obama pushes on with a daunting task ahead of him: Tackling foreign and domestic issues while dealing with a Republican Party opposed to nearly all his major economic initiatives. The second 100 days will be a critical test of Obama's power in getting key legislative priorities -- such as economic recovery, health care, energy and immigration -- passed. With recent polls showing the American public giving him a job approval rating in the ...

In Mexico, few residents now venture out without a surgical face mask as the swine flu outbreak grips the country.

The disease that most people in the United States and worldwide have come to know as "swine flu" has caused a less-publicized rumbling among the nation's hog farmers and producers. China and Russia have banned imports from some U.S. states and Mexico, and stock prices for the nation's leading pork companies, Smithfield Foods Inc. and Tyson Foods Inc., took a hit. In addition, hog futures took a rare dive after initial news of the outbreak broke. The negative news, seen ...

If there's a blessing in the current swine flu epidemic, it's how benign the illness seems to be outside the central disease cluster in Mexico. But history offers a dark warning to anyone ready to write off the 2009 H1N1 virus. In each of the four major pandemics since 1889, a spring wave of relatively mild illness was followed by a second wave, a few months later, of a much more virulent disease. This was true in 1889, 1957, 1968 ...