The Pentagon has notified the U.S. Congress of $2.7 billion in possible new sales to Iraq of air defense and communications systems.

The latest contracts would raise to nearly $5 billion the value of a series of U.S arms sales to Iraq that have been sent to Congress over the past two weeks.

Mothers with a certain gene got meaner when the economy took a dive in 2007-2009, whether or not their own purses were shorter on cash, U.S. researchers said Monday.

The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that environment can have a major impact on behavior, particularly when genetic variations are taken into account.

The Washington Post, the legendary newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal, is being sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as it seeks to survive the onslaught of the Internet.

Donald Graham, grandson of Eugene Meyer, who bought the Post during the Great Depression in 1933, stunned the U.S. media industry on Monday, announcing the sale of the storied title to Bezos for $250 million.

Production has resumed from Libya's western oilfields but protests at the main shipping terminals are still blocking exports from the central coast, Petroleum Minister Abdelbari al-Aroussi said on Monday.

Aroussi said that output was now running at 700,000 barrels per day, up from the low of 330,000 bpd recorded at the height of the protests last week but still far short of the pre-protest average of 1.42 million bpd.

Global banking giant HSBC announced on Monday a 22-percent rise in half-year net profits on lower costs and falling bad-debt charges, while noting that slower Chinese growth was impacting its main market Asia.

Profit after tax jumped to $10.28 billion (7.73 billion euros) in the six months to the end of June compared with the first half of 2012, the British bank and Europe's biggest said in an earnings statement.

The eurozone recession seems to be fading out at last, with key growth indicators giving a surprisingly strong showing, economics experts said on Monday.

A key leading indicator of activity, the Markit Eurozone Composite Purchasing Managers Index for July switched to give a growth reading for the first time for 18 months.

South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) said Monday it had won a $3.3 billion order to build a steam power plant in Saudi Arabia.

Under the deal signed on Sunday with Saudi Electricity Co., Hyundai will complete the massive facility with a production capacity of 2,640 megawatts by 2017, the company said in a statement.

Global banking giant HSBC is closing the accounts of foreign diplomats in Britain and giving them 60 days to move their money, a report said Sunday.

More than 40 embassies and consulates are said to have been affected, including the Vatican, with the decision being described as creating "havoc" in the diplomatic corps.

Syrian President Bashar Assad issued a decree on Sunday banning the use of foreign currency in commercial transactions, state news agency SANA said.

"It is prohibited to make payments, reimbursements, commercial transactions and any other commercial operation in foreign currency or in precious metals," it quoted the decree as saying.

The U.S. economy is steadily adding jobs — just not at a consistently strong pace.

July's modest gain of 162,000 jobs was the smallest since March. And most of the job growth came in lower-paying industries or part-time work.