World/Nation Briefs August 19, 2011

Gunmen attack Israelis, killing 8; airstrikes hit Gaza

EILAT, Israel - Gunmen who crossed from the Egyptian desert launched a series of attacks Thursday in southern Israel, killing eight people and threatening to destabilize a volatile border region that includes the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the increasingly lawless Sinai Peninsula.

Israel blamed an armed Palestinian group from neighboring Gaza. Israeli forces killed five of the gunmen along the border with Egypt, the military said, and later launched an airstrike inside Gaza that killed five other militants from the same group as well as a child.

The Israeli military said three of the dead men in Gaza had been involved in planning the attack.

US, allies demand Syrian president resign

WASHINGTON -

Executing a global squeeze play, the United States and its European allies on Thursday demanded an end to four decades of brutal family dictatorship in Syria and underscored the tough talk with new sanctions on President Bashar Assad's government.

The unified stance isolates Assad further as he presses a military campaign against major demonstrations. But the diplomacy left many questions unanswered, including how the demand for Assad's ouster can be backed up in the absence of any appetite for military intervention, and who inside the Syrian government or among the country's fragmented opposition might take his place.

Police: Norwegian killer called twice to surrender

OSLO, Norway - The man behind the Norway attacks that killed 77 people last month hung up twice on authorities after calling to surrender during the shooting at a youth camp on Utoya island, police said Thursday.

The first phone call came 26 minutes before officers arrested Breivik, who identified himself as the commander in an anti-communist resistance movement, police said.

"I am at Utoya at the moment. I want to surrender," he said, according to a transcript distributed at a news conference.

Local police chief Sissel Hammer said "the operator took the conversation seriously and called back. No one answered."

Breivik called again one minute before being captured and asked to be transferred to the commander of the anti-terror police unit.

Libyan capital

is fearful as

rebels advance

ZINTAN, Libya - Families fleeing their homes to avoid a possible rebel assault on the Libyan capital described deteriorating living conditions in Tripoli: Power outages lasting days, gun battles at night and a climate of fear in which no one dares to criticize the regime - even among friends.

With opposition fighters steadily gaining ground in the six-month-old civil war, there are signs that Moammar Gadhafi's 42-year-old rule may be unraveling. The rebels seized Libya's last functioning oil refinery Thursday and claimed to have captured most of the nearby city of Zawiya, just 30 miles west of the capital along the Mediterranean coast.

Archaeologists comb Civil War POW camp

SAVANNAH, Ga. -

When word reached Camp Lawton that the enemy army of Gen. William T. Sherman was approaching, the prison camp's Confederate officers rounded up their thousands of Union army POWs for a swift evacuation - leaving behind rings, buckles, coins and other keepsakes that would remain undisturbed for nearly 150 years.

Archaeologists are still discovering unusual, and sometimes stunningly personal, artifacts a year after state officials revealed that a graduate student had pinpointed the location of the massive but short-lived Civil War camp in southeast Georgia.

Engineers

consider

undoing history

CHICAGO - The city was in a predicament. By the late 1800s, the slow-moving Chicago River had become a cesspool of sewage and factory pollution oozing into Lake Michigan, the source of drinking water for the bustling metropolis.

The waterway had grown so putrid that it raised fears of a disease outbreak and concerns about hurting development. So in a first-of-its-kind feat, engineers reversed the river by digging a series of canals that not only carried the stinking mess away from the lake, but also created the only shipping route between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.

Now a modern threat - a voracious fish that biologists are desperate to keep out of Lake Michigan - has spurred serious talk of undertaking another engineering feat almost as bold as the original: reversing the river again to restore its flow into the lake.

Animals moving north to escape global warming

WASHINGTON - Animals across the world are fleeing global warming by heading north much faster than they were less than a decade ago, a new study says.

About 2,000 species examined are moving away from the equator at an average rate of more than 15 feet per day, about a mile per year, according to new research published Thursday in the journal Science which analyzed previous studies. Species are also moving up mountains to escape the heat, but more slowly, averaging about 4 feet a year.

- The Associated Press