AP - Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job-seekers with specialized skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Others will face a choice: Take a job with low pay — or none at all.

AP - Investigators looking into what went wrong in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are a step closer to answers now that a key piece of evidence is secure aboard a ship.

AP - Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq's ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

AP - In the turbulent year of the tea party, Republican Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware set out to jangle no nerves as he ran for a Senate seat long held by Vice President Joseph Biden. It's the way Republican strategists originally envisioned 2010, a roster of seasoned politicians pointing the party toward significant gains in the Senate.

AP - It is a place of sacrifice. A place of mourning. A place people pass by on their way to grab lunch. It's a place where tourists crane their necks to snatch a glimpse around barriers walling off an enormous construction site — which is also what it is.

AP - Torrential rains from a tropical depression caused landslides that have killed at least 38 people in Guatemala — some of them rescuers trying to save people already buried under a wall of mud.

AP - While a fire warms their campsite, the icy feeling between Cristina Nunez Macias and her mother-in-law is as palpable as the cold Atacama desert.

AP - East Asia is the world's electronics factory, yet unless they are Japanese, producers are largely anonymous. Now HTC Corp., a Taiwanese maker of smart phones, is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple's iPhone.

AP - Venus Williams struggled with her serve. She kept tugging at her dress. Every bit as big a nuisance was her opponent, Shahar Peer.

Reuters - President Barack Obama will ask the Congress on Wednesday to increase and permanently extend a tax credit for business research as a way of boosting job growth, an administration officials said on Sunday.

Reuters - Up to six suicide bombers, some armed with rifles, tried to storm an army base in Baghdad on Sunday, killing 12 people and wounding 36 less than a week after Washington declared U.S. combat operations in Iraq over.

Reuters - Strong aftershocks and gale-force winds buffeted a clean-up of New Zealand's second biggest city on Sunday following the country's most damaging earthquake in 80 years.

Reuters - Oracle Corp has offered a job to Mark Hurd, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co who resigned amid a scandal involving inaccurate expense receipts related to a female contractor, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Reuters - The U.S. government is likely to take a loss on General Motors Co in the first offering of the automaker's stock, six people familiar with preparations for the landmark IPO said.

Reuters - Pro-Taliban Pakistani militants are trying to create a sectarian rift, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Saturday, as a new wave of violence piled pressure on a government already struggling with a flood crisis.

Reuters - Hurricane Earl made landfall in Canada on Saturday and fizzled after a series of scares along the U.S. East Coast, flooding roads, felling trees and cutting power to tens of thousands in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia.

AFP - Basque separatist fighters ETA declared a ceasefire Sunday in their flagging, decades-long campaign of bombing and shooting for a homeland independent of Spain.

AFP - American troops were among those who fired back to repel a coordinated suicide attack on an Iraqi army complex that killed 12 people on Sunday, days after US forces officially ended combat operations in the country.