International

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday it will suspend operations at a factory complex it has jointly run with South Korea, pulling out more than 53,000 North Korean workers and moving closer to severing its last economic link with its rival as tensions escalate.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — U.N. experts are poised to move into Syria within 24 hours to investigate reported chemical weapons attacks in the country’s civil war, but President Bashar Assad’s government still has not given them the green light to enter the country, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday.

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea has moved a missile with “considerable range” to its east coast, South Korea’s defence minister said Thursday, but he added that there are no signs that Pyongyang is preparing for a full-scale conflict.

BERLIN — A World War II bomb was defused near Berlin’s main railway station on Wednesday after trains were diverted, nearby houses evacuated and flights to the city’s main airport briefly disrupted.

MILWAUKEE — Suspicion quickly fell on a research assistant who had been working in a scientist’s lab when three vials of a possible cancer-fighting compound disappeared recently from the professor’s desk at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

PHOENIX — A transgender man whose divorce request was rejected by an Arizona judge is expected to comment for the first time Tuesday on the ruling that prevents him from ending his marriage.
Thomas Beatie was born a woman and later underwent a double-mastectomy and began hormone therapy to become a man. But he retained female reproductive organs and gave birth to three children.

The U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote Tuesday on what would be the first U.N. treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar international arms trade after Iran, North Korea and Syria blocked its adoption by consensus.

MAYFLOWER, Ark. — Exxon Mobil Corp. says crews are working to contain and clean up an oil spill near Mayflower, Ark., after its Pegasus pipeline ruptured Friday afternoon.
The pipeline carries Canadian heavy crude oil from Patoka, Illinois to refineries on the Texas Gulf coast.

CHICAGO — Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world’s most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits.

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Monday shifted, at least temporarily, away from weeks of warlike rhetoric, appointing a new premier seen as an economic reformer after a high-level declaration that nuclear bomb building and a stronger economy are the nation’s top priorities.