LONDON — British police arrested nine people Wednesday in the central England city of Birmingham as part of a “major counterterrorism operation,” police said.

NEW YORK — The United States lags far behind virtually all wealthy countries with regard to family-oriented workplace policies such as maternity leave, paid sick days and support for breast-feeding, a new study by Harvard and McGill University researchers says.

WASHINGTON — More than a third of early tax return filers are not requesting the one-time telephone tax refund entitling them to at least $30, the Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday.

TRACY — Authorities have euthanized a brain-damaged sea lion that scientists believe swam through inland waterways all the way from the Channel Islands to a San Joaquin Valley dairy farm.

WASHINGTON — Major U.S. companies with multimillion-dollar contracts for Iraq reconstruction are being forced to devote 12.5 percent of their expenses for security due to spiraling violence in the region, investigators said Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday he will turn over secret documents detailing the government’s domestic spying program, ending a two-week standoff with the Senate Judiciary Committee over surveillance targeting terrorist suspects.

BOSTON  — The fine grit in polluted air boosts the risk of heart disease in older women much more powerfully than scientists realized, a big federally funded study has found, raising questions of whether U.S. environmental standards are strict enough.

NEW YORK — President Bush acknowledged Wednesday that there is growing income inequality in the United States, addressing for the first time a subject that has long concerned Democrats and liberal economists.

AUSTIN, Texas — Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as “Shrub,” died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.

SACRAMENTO — The family of a 23-year-old man who was shot after a party in the North Natomas neighborhood say he was killed because one of his friends was speaking Spanish.