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BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- Homes, gardens and highways across south Lebanon are littered with unexploded cluster bombs dropped by Israel, the U.N. said Friday, and the U.S. State Department has reportedly launched an investigation. "There are about 285 cluster bomb locations across south Lebanon, and our teams are still doing surveys and adding new locations every day," said Dalya Farran, spokeswoman for the U.N. Mine Action Coordination Center, which has an office in the southern port  ...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Engineers on Friday moved the giant statue of Pharaoh Ramses II from a congested square in Cairo to its new home near the more peaceful Great Pyramids. Contractors moved the more than 3,200-year-old statue from Ramses Square in an effort to save it from exhaust fumes and other environmental hazards that were causing the 83-ton structure to deteriorate. Onlookers crowded along the street around the statue, which was surrounded by a convoy including 1,500 soldiers, during th ...

VENTURA, California (AP) -- Jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, known for his soaring high notes and for his recording of "Gonna Fly Now," a hit version of the theme from the "Rocky" movies, has died. He was 78. Ferguson, who lived in nearby Ojai, died Wednesday night at Community Memorial Hospital of kidney and liver failure due to an abdominal infection, friend and manager Steve Schankman said Thursday. Ferguson's four daughters, Kim, Lisa, Corby and Wilder, and other family ...

DUBLIN, Ireland (Reuters) -- Irish police questioned 239 passengers travelling on an Aer Lingus flight from New York to Shannon airport in southwest Ireland on Friday after a bomb scare sparked a security alert. Officials said the Airbus A-330 aircraft made a normal landing at Shannon airport at 7.45 a.m. after police received a 999 call about the flight that referred to "some potential expl ...

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) -- Islamic leaders in Mogadishu gave a woman 11 lashes for selling cannabis Thursday, the first female to receive such punishment since the fundamentalist rulers took over the capital in June. The woman, who throughout the beating insisted she was innocent, was flogged alongside five other men at the Yassin Square in Mogadishu in front of several hundred people. The small bundle of cannabis, worth around $1 on the streets in the capital, was burned before the crowd. &qu ...

LONDON, England -- The eldest son of Tony Blair has been taken to hospital in Barbados suffering from stomach pains, according to the British prime minister's office. Euan Blair, 22, was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital near Bridgetown but was expected to be discharged later on Friday. "We can confirm that Euan Blair was taken into hospital with a stomach complaint," said a spokeswoman at the prime minister's office. Downing Street sources told the Press Association that Euan ...

LONDON, England (AP) -- An Aer Lingus flight from New York was evacuated Friday morning following a threat against the aircraft, airport authorities said. The 239 passengers aboard the plane, Aer Lingus flight 112, were evacuated during a scheduled stop at 0650 GMT at Shannon airport in western Ireland, said airport spokesman Eugene Pratt. The threat "came to a police station in Dublin, and ...

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- China jailed a New York Times researcher for three years for fraud on Friday, a day after a blind human rights campaigner was sentenced to four years in prison. But the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court dismissed a charge of leaking state secrets against Zhao Yan, a Beijing-based civil rights campaigner-turned-journalist, his lawyers said. China appears to have launched a crackdown on "rights defenders" -- a growing network of lawyers, academics a ...

VICTORIA, British Columbia (AP) -- A 4 1/2-year-old boy who survived a cougar attack while on a family camping trip at a remote Vancouver Island park is mad at the big cat, his father said Wednesday. The boy, Paul Daniel Krismer, knows he was ambushed by a cougar, but has no sense of how close he came to losing his life, said his father, Paul Krismer. "He thinks it's a bad cat that made a b ...

(CNN) -- A man shot and killed his ex-girlfriend and his ex-girlfriend's mother at separate locations during a Thursday shooting spree that included a stop at an Essex, Vermont, elementary school, police said. The rampage in the rural Vermont town came to an end when the gunman turned the weapon on himself, police said. In all, three people were wounded, including the shooter, according to police. The gunman was being treated for a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. (Watch how the tra ...