LONDON – Major precious metals fell sharply in Monday trading in Europe as part of a wide financial market sell-off that saw industrial metals, oil and equities all buckling under speculative selling from record highs. “Obviously there has been talk of a much-needed correction in precious and base metals. And …

KABUL, Afghanistan – The U.S. military on Wednesday defended an airstrike earlier this week on a southern Afghan village that killed at least 16 civilians, saying its troops were being fired on and they had the right to defend themselves. Meanwhile, 60 Taliban militants and four Afghan soldiers were killed …

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Researchers, including faculty from the University of Tennessee and Vanderbilt University, have discovered a new way to make microchips that could lead to producing them faster and better. A team of five researchers used a laser to remove hydrogen atoms from layers of silicon in a microchip. …

WASHINGTON – Senators voted Thursday to reject an effort to abolish taxes on inherited estates during an election year with control of Congress at stake. GOP leaders had pushed senators to permanently eliminate the estate tax, which disappears in 2010 under President Bush‘s first tax cut, but rears up again …

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The Big Ten Conference will create its own cable channel to showcase its athletic and academic programs and has reached new broadcast and cable deals with ABC Sports and ESPN, the conference announced Wednesday. The new channel — which will be created in partnership with Fox Cable …

TOKYO – Toshiba Corp. said Thursday it will start selling the world’s first recorders for the HD DVD high-definition video disc next month. The new recorder, the RD-A1, combines an HD DVD burner with a one-terabyte hard disk and can record and store up to 130 hours of high-definition broadcasts, …

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – Up to 200,000 people in the Wilkes-Barre area were ordered to evacuate their homes Wednesday because of rising water on the Susquehanna River, swelled by a record-breaking deluge that has killed at least 12 people across the Northeast. Thousands more were ordered to leave their homes in …

JAKARTA, Indonesia – A Playboy magazine editor and a centerfold model who appeared in the first edition in Indonesia were named by police Thursday as suspects in an indecency case, a move praised by religious hard-liners in the predominantly Muslim country. The magazine launched a toned-down version in Indonesia in …

Weight loss surgery may cut the risk of heart disease by nearly half among the extremely obese. A new study shows that extremely obese people who had weight loss surgery had less than half the risk of heart disease following surgery and were also less likely to require heart surgery …

WASHINGTON – The government announced an agreement Friday with a Canadian company that is the world’s largest zinc producer on paying for a study of heavy-metal pollution in the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River. Teck Cominco Ltd. of Vancouver, British Columbia, agreed to put up $20 million for assessing the impact …