AP - Microsoft Corp. announced a shake-up Thursday of the unit that includes its flagship Windows operating system, two days after the company admitted it won't have its next consumer version of Windows ready for the holiday season as planned.

AP - Tiger Woods says the competitiveness he learned from his mother helped him overcome a childhood stutter.

AP - The Basque militant group ETA ended a decades-long campaign of terror, announcing a permanent cease-fire Wednesday that closes the door on one of Western Europe's last armed separatist movements.

AP - The Dallas Cowboys got the receiver their fans loved to hate. The New England Patriots gave away the kicker their fans hated to lose.

AP - The sports talk radio station in Boston extended its programming an extra hour to stay with the story. The newspapers put it on the front page. And anywhere New England Patriots fans gathered, the team's latest free agent loss was mourned.

AP - Now that the Jets have two first-round picks, they might consider using them to make a trade in the draft next month.

AP - Microsoft Corp. will delay the consumer release of its new Windows operating system until January 2007, missing the holiday sales season and throwing some PC makers and retailers into turmoil.

AP - Two months after warning that the U.N. strategy in Sudan has failed, the top United Nations envoy for the country told the Security Council on Tuesday that fighting has only gotten worse and innocent people are still dying.

AP - Steve Hutchinson and Tom Condon have seemingly turned the NFL's "transition tag" term into a matter to review.

AP - It should have been the crowning moment in one of Lee Melchionni's best games in weeks. Instead, he had to fend off ridicule from his teammates.

AP - Colorado's leading scorer Alex Tanguay will be out for two-to-four weeks with a sprained right knee.

Reuters - Violence is surging in Sudan's south as well as its western Darfur region, fueled by government inaction even after years of global attention, U.N. envoy Jan Pronk told the Security Council on Tuesday.

AP - For the past two months, Ehud Olmert has presided over Israel's Cabinet meetings from a seat at the side of the table, leaving the prime minister's chair empty as though Ariel Sharon were still in charge. But since becoming acting prime minister after Sharon's devastating Jan. 4 stroke, Olmert has quickly put his mark on the government in what has become an audition for the top job.

AP - These aren't the hide-in-the-hills leftists of yesteryear, ready to take up arms against the oppressor. A new wave of Latin American leaders — variously labeled leftist, populist, nationalist or socialist — is redefining politics in a region where U.S.-backed, right-wing dictatorships spent decades crushing their mostly leftist opponents and supporting corporate interests amid fears of inroads by the Soviet Union and its Cuban proxy.

AP - Former Vice President Al Gore said Monday he's not planning to run for president in 2008 but hasn't ruled out a future in politics.

AP - The Seahawks must match the guarantee provision in the $49 million, seven-year deal offered to All-Pro guard Steve Hutchinson by the Minnesota Vikings if the NFC champions want to keep their transition player.

AP - Asked recently whether he wants to be president, Mayor Michael Bloomberg responded in that brusque, smart-alecky way New Yorkers are famous for: "Which letter of the word `No' do you not understand?"

AP - In the desert chill, on the lonely nighttime roads of Iraq, Joe Johnson looks out over his machine gun and thinks of Justin. It was on Easter morning 2004 that a chaplain and a colonel appeared on Joe and Jan Johnson's Georgia doorstep with the news. Justin, the boy Joe had fished and hunted with, the soldier son who'd gone off to Iraq a month earlier, was suddenly dead at 22, killed by a roadside bomb planted in a Baghdad slum.

Reuters - The poster for "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" -- showing TV's "The O.C." hunk Chris Carmack relaxing in bed between cigarette-smoking Alec Baldwin and black-bra-clad Jan Maxwell -- is naughtier than anything in the revival of Joe Orton's once-groundbreaking play.

AP - Tension loomed over a presidential election Sunday in Belarus despite a near certain victory for hard-line incumbent Alexander Lukashenko, the latest leader on Russia's periphery to face a potentially explosive confrontation with opponents desperate for change.