Today's Details

-Military commanders in Iraq are developing a plan to move as many as 5,000 U.S. troops with armored vehicles and tanks into the country's capital in an effort to quell escalating violence, defense officials said Thursday. DETAILS

-Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Europe's second-largest oil company, said Thursday its second-quarter earnings jumped 40 percent as high oil prices offset production difficulties in Nigeria and the Gulf of Mexico. Net profit rose to $7.32 billion from $5.24 billion a year earlier. Sales rose less than 1 percent to $83.1 billion from $82.6 billion. DETAILS

-Democratic senators renewed their opposition to extending the tenure of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, saying today that he remained a prickly, divisive and ineffective figure. When Mr. Bolton was first nominated for the position last year, he had “evidenced great skepticism and disdain for the United Nations and multilateral diplomacy generally,” said Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. “Nothing he has said or done since assuming his current position in New York suggests he has altered his views.” DETAILS

-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday directed more than 2,500 U.S. troops who have spent the past year in Iraq to stay up to four months past their scheduled departure date, boosting the size of the U.S. force amid unrelenting violence in Baghdad, officials said. DETAILS

-Exxon Mobil Corp. said Thursday it earned $10.36 billion in the April-June period, the second largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded U.S. company. The earnings figure was 36 percent above the profit it reported a year ago. High oil prices and the growing global appetite for fuel helped boost the company's revenue by 12 percent to a level just short of a quarterly record. Its shares briefly rose to a new high. DETAILS

-Former basketball star Charles Barkley says he's switched political teams from Republican to Democrat and is again talking about running for governor in his home state, possibly in 2010. DETAILS