World and European champion Spain stays atop FIFA’s monthly world rankings, despite losing a friendly to England which climbs two places to No. 5.

The Netherlands remains second but third-placed Germany narrowed the gap after winning 3-0 in a friendly between the sides.

A finalist in three of the last four years, Manchester United is struggling to even get out of its group in this season's Champions League.

Barcelona, Real Madrid and AC Milan were joined on Tuesday by two more of Europe's footballing elite, Bayern Munich and Inter Milan, in the knockout stage of the game's biggest club competition.

Thailand's criminal court sentenced a 61-year-old man to 20 years in prison Wednesday for sending text messages deemed offensive to the country's queen.

The court found Amphon Tangnoppaku guilty on four counts under the country's lese majeste and computer crime laws, sentencing him to five years imprisonment for each charge.

The U.S. handed over all of the remaining detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq Tuesday, except for a Hizbullah commander linked to the death of four American troops, Iraqi and American officials said.

The prisoner transfer marks another step toward the American military's withdrawal from Iraq, as it plans for all U.S. troops to be out of the country by the end of this year.

Seven vinyl banners draped this month along one of Chicago's most iconic bridges — advertisements some have dubbed "a visual crime" and "commercial graffiti" — are reviving a debate about how governments raise money in tough economic times.

In the aftermath of the recession, a public school district in Colorado is selling ads on report cards and Utah has a new law allowing ads on school buses. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration, straining to fill a $600 million budget hole, is looking to raise $25 million from ads on city property — including bridges, electrical storage boxes and garbage cans.

Move over Mozart. Toes in Salzburg are tapping to a new beat as residents finally embrace the Hollywood musical that put them on the map nearly half a century ago.

Playing for the first time in this haughty town of opera lovers, "The Sound of Music," has been met with surprisingly positive reactions in what is commonly considered a last bulwark of resistance to the iconic show.

Keith Richards equates the rush to release the Rolling Stones' seminal album "Some Girls" as "the same as cutting off your baby's head."

"We couldn't release a double album and we were on deadline," the guitarist said of the 1978 recording. "Sometimes you're really getting into tracks you want to finish, but they don't make (it) because time was up."

Greece's largest trade union called Tuesday for a 24-hour strike next week to protest austerity measures, which would be the first major walkout since the appointment of an interim coalition government earlier this month.

The GSEE union, which represents mainly private sector workers, said it was aiming for a general strike on Dec. 1, but was waiting for a decision later Tuesday by the country's civil servants' union as to whether they would join. Greece's last general strike, held in October, saw services across the country shut down for two days.

The Indian rupee plunged to an all time low against the dollar Tuesday as global demand for the U.S. currency and India's darkening economic picture swamped out central bank efforts to staunch the decline.

The rupee hit 52.73 to the dollar, breaching its March 3, 2009 low, analysts said.

The collapse of talks aimed at reducing the staggering U.S. budget deficit weighed on world markets Tuesday but failed to stifle a rebound in Europe.

Stocks took a pummeling on Monday after a so-called supercommittee in Congress failed to reach a deal to cut the U.S. federal budget deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years. While not entirely unexpected, the failure heightened worries that political bickering — in the U.S. and Europe — will hurt efforts to cut debt during a period of declining economic growth.