BEIRUT

Attacks on Homs, Aleppo intensify pressure on rebels

The Syrian military opened a second urban front Friday, attacking the rebel stronghold of Homs with the most intense artillery barrage in months and putting opposition fighters there and in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, increasingly on the defensive.

Syria’s civil war has been locked in a bloody stalemate, and embattled President Bashar Assad could extend his hold on power if he retakes Aleppo and Homs. Amateur video from Homs, a symbol of resistance, showed black columns of smoke rising from the city, as loud explosions went off every few seconds.

While Assad stepped up attacks at home, tensions with neighboring Turkey flared again Friday, reviving fears that the 18-month-old conflict in Syria could ignite a regional conflagration.

The crisis began on Wednesday, when a Syrian shell killed five civilians in a Turkish border town and triggered unprecedented artillery strikes by Turkey, coupled with warnings that Turkey would no longer tolerate such acts. On Friday, a Syrian mortar round again hit inside Turkey, causing no injuries, and Turkish troops returned fire, the state-run news agency Anadolu said.

In the past, Turkey did not respond to stray Syrian shells, but Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested Friday that those days are over. “I once again call on Assad’s regime and its supporters: Do not try to test Turkey’s patience, do not try to test Turkey’s limits,” he said.

MOSCOW

Mammoth’s remains dug up in Siberia, scientists report

A teenage mammoth that once roamed the Siberian tundra in search of fodder and females might have been killed by an Ice Age man on a summer day tens of thousands of years ago, a Russian scientist said Friday.

Prof. Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoology Institute in St. Petersburg announced the finding of the mammoth, which was excavated from the Siberian permafrost in late September near the Sopochnaya Karga cape, 2,200 miles northeast of Moscow.

The 16-year-old mammoth has been named Jenya, after the 11-year-old Russian boy who found the animal’s limbs sticking out of the frozen mud. The mammoth was 6 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed 1,100 pounds. “He was pretty small for his age,” Tikhonov said.

But what killed Jenya was not his size but a missing left tusk that made him unfit for fights with other mammoths or human hunters who were settling the Siberian marshes and swamps some 20,000-30,000 years ago, Tikhonov said.

WASHINGTON

Tainted peanut butter plant fielded FDA criticism in 2010

The Food and Drug Administration found what it called “objectionable conditions” at a New Mexico peanut butter plant in 2010, two years before the current outbreak of salmonella poisoning linked to Trader Joe’s peanut butter produced there.

The FDA said Friday that a recent inspection found salmonella in the plant which produced Trader Joe’s Valencia Creamy Peanut Butter and many other nut butters and nut products for several large national grocery chains. The Trader Joe’s peanut butter is now linked to 35 salmonella illnesses in 19 states — most of them in children under the age of 10.

Though the illnesses have only been linked to the Trader Joe’s peanut butter, New Mexico-based Sunland Inc. has recalled everything made in the plant since March of 2010 — a total of 240 products. The company last month recalled 101 products that were manufactured in the plant this year.

— From news service reports