PORTLAND, Oregon: Senator John McCain sought to distance himself from President George W. Bush this week as he called for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States to combat climate change. McCain, in a speech on Monday at a wind power company, also pledged to work with the European Union to diplomatically engage China and India, two of the world's biggest polluters, if the nations refuse to participate in an international agreement to slow global warming.

YANGON, Myanmar: Aid continued to arrive in Myanmar on Tuesday - a darkly clouded and rainy day here and in the south - but international aid experts and diplomats in the capital expressed concern that the government was not up to the task of delivering the aid effectively.

NEW YORK: Researchers in New York have created what is believed to be the first genetically engineered human embryo, which critics immediately branded as a step toward "designer babies." But the researchers, at Cornell University, say they used an abnormal embryo that could never have turned into a baby. "This particular piece of work was done on an embryo that was never going to be viable," said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital. He said the purpose of the work was stem cell research.

DUJIANGYAN, China: The children who were considered fortunate escaped with a broken bone or a severed limb. The others, hundreds of them, were carried out to be buried, and their remaining classmates lay crushed beneath the rubble of the schoolhouse. "There's no hope for them," said Lu Zhiqing, 58, as she watched uniformed rescue workers trudge through mud and rain toward the mound of bricks and concrete that had once been a school. "There's no way anyone's still alive in there."

BEIJING: Tens of thousands of people throughout southwest China remained buried beneath rubble Tuesday as rescue workers struggled to reach areas cut off by a powerful earthquake that has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands injured and homeless. The authorities said that more than 18,000 people were still unaccounted for in the city of Mianzhu and that 2,300 were missing in the collapse of a school and two factories in the town of Shifang.

BEIJING: A powerful earthquake struck a mountainous region of western China on Monday, reportedly killing more than 7,600 people, including as many as 5,000 people in a single county. The quake also trapped more than 900 students beneath a collapsed high school as tremors shook buildings throughout China and were felt as far away as Thailand and Vietnam, according to interviews and reports in China's state media.

BEIJING: A fast-spreading viral outbreak in eastern China has killed 21 children, sickened nearly 3,000 others and caused panic among parents in an impoverished corner of Anhui Province, state news media reported Friday.

NEW DELHI: Forty years after he helped rescue the world from growing famine and a deepening gloom over the future of food supplies, Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan is once again agitating for an agricultural revolution - this time a perpetual one. The 82-year-old scientist, regarded in India as the father of the Green Revolution for helping develop a hybrid wheat seed that allowed Indian farmers to dramatically increase yields, said the current food crisis offered the world a chance to put farmers on the right road to unending growth.

NEW YORK: The first time John Johnson's artificial hip squeaked, he was bending down to pick up a pine cone in his yard in Thomasville, Georgia. Johnson looked up, expecting to find an animal nearby. Susan O'Toole, a nutritionist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, who first squeaked going upstairs after getting home from her hip-replacement surgery in 2005, said she thought the banister she was gripping needed repair.

TOKYO: Toyota Motor said Thursday that the slowdown in the U.S. economy would most likely cause its first annual decline in profit in nine years, and accelerate a shift by it and other Asian carmakers into emerging markets like China, Latin America and the Middle East.