AT&T Inc. will hang up the phone on its embattled bid to take over T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. The company is calling off the deal, which has hit a series of increasingly serious state and federal roadblocks, and said it would take a $4 billion pre-tax charge as part of its breakup fee to T-Mobile.

A U.S. military convoy sliced through the flat Iraqi desert before first light, carrying the last troops safely into Kuwait and ending America’s costly and divisive war in a troubled land.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, the mercurial strongman who styled himself as a “Dear Leader” while ruling over an impoverished police state, died at 69, according to North Korean state media.

Barry Bonds, baseball’s home run king, was sentenced Friday to two years’ probation with home confinement, plus a $4,000 fine, for giving evasive testimony to a federal grand jury eight years ago during an investigation of doping in sports.

One person was killed and more than 130 injured, including 32 military police, in a clash Friday with pro-democracy protesters in downtown Cairo, the Egyptian Health Ministry said.

Christopher Hitchens, the engaging and enraging British-American author and essayist whose polemical writings on religion, politics, war and other provocations established him as one of his generation’s most robust public intellectuals, has died. He was 62.

A new round of polling shows President Barack Obama ahead of the two leading Republican candidates in the 2012 election. But 11 months before the votes are actually cast, how much stock should be put into these findings?

Three crowd-pleasers with wildly different tones — “The Help,” “Bridesmaids” and “Midnight in Paris” — led the way in the outstanding cast performance category at the nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Wednesday.

States should implement a full ban on cellphones — even hands-free devices — when driving except in emergency situations, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended on Tuesday. The board said the dangers outweighed any benefits to talking or texting while on the road.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is teaming with aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan to launch a space-travel operation. The plan includes designing and building “the largest aircraft ever constructed,” which will carry a space rocket to an altitude of about 30,000 feet for an air launch into orbit.