PRESIDENTIAL RACE-TRUMP SUPPORTERS

BLUFFTON, South Carolina — Donald Trump pushes back ever harder against Republicans fed up with his provocations, disclosing one rival presidential candidate's mobile number in a fiery speech that escalated his feuding with his own party. 

PRESIDENTIAL RACE-KASICH

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio's John Kasich, a blunt Republican governor known for defying his party, becomes the 16th notable Republican contestant to enter the U.S. 2016 presidential race. 

OBAMA

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania — President Barack Obama denounces "chest-beating" critics and tells a veterans group that those who oppose the diplomatic agreement to rein in Iran's nuclear program are some of the same people who were quick to want to go to war in Iraq and thought military action there would take only a matter of months.

UNITED STATES-ISRAEL

AMMAN, Jordan — In high-stakes talks aimed at calming U.S. allies' fears about the Iran nuclear deal, Defense Secretary Ash Carter appeared to change no minds among Israeli leaders fiercely opposed to the deal. By National Security Writer Robert Burns. 

KHORASAN LEADER KILLED

WASHINGTON — A U.S. airstrike in Syria has killed a key figure in a dangerous al-Qaida offshoot, the Defense Department says. Muhsin al-Fadhli was killed in a July 8 air attack while traveling in a vehicle near Sarmada, Syria, Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis says in a statement. Davis did not further elaborate on the nature of the air strike, such as whether al-Fadhli was killed by a drone or a piloted aircraft. Al-Fadhli was a leader of the Khorasan Group, a cadre of al-Qaida operatives who were sent from Pakistan to Syria to plot attacks on the West.

OBIT-DOCTOROW

NEW YORK — Writer E.L. Doctorow, who wryly reimagined the American experience in such novels as "Ragtime" and "The March" and applied its lessons to the past and the future in fiction and nonfiction, has died. He was 84. 

MEXICO-DRUG LORD ESCAPES

MEXICO CITY — Mexico's most powerful drug lord, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, has escaped prison into a changed drug-trafficking business. Rival cartels have been vanquished, but a new gang is rapidly strengthening, and his own cartel has seen bloody infighting and may have lost some of its smuggling routes to other gangs.