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AP - Tropical Storm Hernan gained strength on Thursday as it churned far off Mexico's Pacific coast.

AP - Riot police used tear gas Wednesday as they blocked hundreds of Venezuelans protesting what they call new moves by President Hugo Chavez to concentrate his power. The demonstrators said a blacklist barring key opposition candidates from elections and a series of socialist decrees are destroying what's left of their democracy.

AP - Mexico is protesting the execution of one of its citizens in Texas despite a world court ruling for a new hearing, expressing concern for the rights of other Mexicans detained in the United States.

Reuters - Texas defied the World Court and executed a Mexican national by lethal injection on Tuesday over the objections of the international judicial body and neighboring Mexico.

Reuters - Venezuela's top court ruled on Tuesday that dozens of politicians, among them leading opponents of President Hugo Chavez, will not be allowed to run in regional elections later this year.

Reuters - A U.S. nuclear-powered submarine which has steadily been leaking a small amount of radiation for over two years stopped at three Japanese ports, as well as Guam and Pearl Harbor, the United States and Japan said on Thursday.

AFP - Australian police are reviewing 7,000 cases solved through the use of DNA evidence after a mistake was discovered in one murder case, a senior officer said Thursday.

Reuters - Australian police will re-examine 7,000 crimes solved through DNA evidence after a mistake forced detectives to free a suspect wrongly accused of murder.

AFP - Two people were killed Thursday in an explosion on a beach in the southern Russian resort city of Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Russian news media reported.

Reuters - Two people were killed and three others injured by an explosion on a beach in Sochi on Thursday, Russia's popular Black Sea resort which will host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, local police said.

Reuters - Russia and the United States called on Wednesday for a halt to violence in Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia where separatists made disputed claims of military success against Tbilisi's forces.

Reuters - Russia buried Soviet-era dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn at a 16th-century monastery on Wednesday after a religious ceremony attended by President Dmitry Medvedev which bore all the hallmarks of a state funeral.

AP - Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed the horrors of Soviet slave labor camps, was buried Wednesday in a cemetery filled with evocations of Communist cruelty and the fight against it that defined his life.

Reuters - Russia may consider deploying strategic bombers or station tactical missiles in its close ally Belarus as a counter-measure to a planned U.S. missile shield in Europe, Moscow's envoy to Minsk said on Wednesday.

AFP - Japan is using its ongoing territorial dispute with Russia over the Kuril Islands to turn its people against Moscow, said junior foreign minister Alexei Borodavkin in an interview published Wednesday.

Hong Kong deported three Chinese pro-democracy activists based in the U.S. after denying them entry to the territory, a local lawmaker said Thursday.

The Mediterranean nation of Cyprus is deep in drought, so deep that the flow of water, or lack of it, dictates daily lives. A Reuters correspondent describes that reality.

Malaysia's top opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on Thursday dismissed as "treacherous" a sodomy charge against him, but remained free on bail to campaign for a by-election to Parliament.

Aug. 5: With the Beijing Olympics just days away, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell looks ahead to the future of China’s relationship with the United States. (Today Show)

Israel is building up its strike capabilities amid growing anxiety over Iran's nuclear ambitions and appears confident that a military attack would cripple Tehran's atomic program.