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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. business groups said on Thursday they had received few clues what steps the United States might take to punish Russia for its military action in Georgia, but urged the White House to proceed cautiously.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia's invasion of Georgia has raised concerns among senior Pentagon officials about long-term U.S.-Russian relations, including future military ties, the top U.S. military official said on Thursday.

TBILISI (Reuters) - Georgia's parliament approved a resolution on Thursday calling on the government to cut diplomatic ties with Russia after Moscow backed the secession of two Georgian rebel regions.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a law allowing abortion in the capital, handing a victory to leftist city lawmakers over conservative President Felipe Calderon's government and the Catholic Church.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. forces arrested the deputy head of a committee that purged Iraq's government of members of Saddam Hussein's party, an ally said, but the U.S. military said he was a wanted militia leader behind a deadly Baghdad bombing.

LONDON (Reuters) - British police charged three men with terrorism offences on Thursday over threats to kill Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted on a militant Islamic website.

ROME (Reuters) - An Italian museum on Thursday defied Pope Benedict and refused to remove a modern art sculpture portraying a crucified green frog holding a beer mug and an egg that the Vatican had condemned as blasphemous.

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Government forces fought Tutsi rebels on Thursday in the fiercest clashes for months in eastern Congo, threatening a struggling peace process, the defence minister said on Thursday.

BHUBANESWAR, India (Reuters) - Hindu mobs ransacked a church and clashed with Christian villagers in eastern India on Thursday, police said, as Italy said it would summon India's ambassador to demand "incisive action" to prevent more attacks.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has reshuffled and replaced the head of a negotiating team seeking to finalize an agreement on the future presence of U.S. troops here, a senior Iraqi politician said on Thursday.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he suspected someone in the United States provoked the conflict in Georgia in an attempt to help a candidate in the U.S. presidential election.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Thursday said scrapping a U.S.-Russia civil nuclear agreement was under discussion in the aftermath of the Georgia conflict, but there was no announcement at this time.

BEDUM, Netherlands (Reuters) - The Tower of Pisa is being challenged by a lesser-known 12th-century building in the northern Dutch town of Bedum as Europe's most steeply leaning tower.

DENVER (Reuters) - To shouts of "Yes we can," Democrats nominated Barack Obama on Wednesday as their presidential candidate in a historic first for a black American, backed by his ex-rivals Bill and Hillary Clinton.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Major inequalities in health and life expectancy persist worldwide, according to an independent World Health Organization commission which on Thursday called for all countries to offer universal health care.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Presidential candidates searching for votes in the U.S. heartland will find rising poverty. But appealing to the poor is not necessarily a winning strategy, analysts said.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia successfully tested a long-range Topol missile designed to avoid detection by anti-missile defence systems from its Plesetsk launch site, a Russian military spokesman said on Thursday.

LONDON (Reuters) - A British computer expert accused by the United States of "the biggest military hack of all time" lost an appeal on Thursday and could be extradited within weeks.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. troops will on Sept. 1 hand over control of Iraq's Anbar province, once the heart of a bloody Sunni Arab insurgency, reflecting a dramatic drop in violence across the country, an Iraqi official said on Thursday.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican has warned journalists who will travel with Pope Benedict to Lourdes next month not to put the revered water from the shrine in their hand luggage on the papal plane or it may be confiscated.