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Two differing accounts have raised questions about an attack on a house in Balad, Iraq, last Wednesday. An Iraqi police report says U.S. forces executed 11 family members. The U.S. military says that is highly unlikely. Matthew Schofield, of Knight Ridder's European Bureau, talks with Melissa Block about the report.

More than a million students and union members march to fight a law easing hiring and firing of workers. The goverment says it will help cut youth unemployment. Opponents say it erodes job security and other benefits.

Since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, Serbs feel they have no identity. There is no national anthem, and the passports still say Republic of Yugoslavia. After years of isolation, sanctions and international criticism, Serbs feel they are on the fringes of the world.

Japan can call itself the world champion of baseball. The Japanese team captured the inaugural World Baseball Classic by beating Cuba 10-6 in the championship game San Diego.

"Happy as a clam" is a shortened form of an old idiom, "happy as a clam at high tide." Just as you might suspect, early Americans decided that clams are happiest when they're undisturbed. It's one of many idioms that have left behind their full phrasing.

The opposition leader in Belarus is calling on supporters to stand their ground. The backers of Alexander Milinkevich are camped out in freezing weather to protest results of an election largely seen as a farce by international observers.

Microsoft won't offer the consumer release of its new Windows operating system until January 2007. That's bad news for personal computer makers, retailers and computers, because it means the Windows packages won't be available for the 2006 holiday sale season.

Fuel supplies for the Palestinian Authority have nearly been exhausted; its Israeli supplier has cut off deliveries because the authority's account is $80 million in arrears. Gas stations in Ramallah, the Palestinians' political and commercial capital, are closed, and drivers say that once their tanks run dry, they will have to stay home.

Sidney Bechet played soprano saxophone in the early decades of jazz, before John Coltrane popularized the instrument. A new anthology, Mosaic Select: Sidney Bechet, offers listeners a chance to hear Bechet's music, transferred and restored from rare recordings from 1923 to 1947.

The upcoming FIFA World Cup soccer tournament will feature the best teams the world has to offer -- and arguable the most devoted fans of any global sporting event. The quadrennial tournament's championship game will be played in Berlin on July 9.