BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian government forces attacked rebels withhelicopter gunships in the heart of Damascus on Tuesday, escalating a campaign to crush their opponents as clashes spread to new areas, illustrating the rebels' growing reach.

Cracks of gunfire and explosions echoed inside the capital for a third day, including a firefight near the country's parliament, in an unprecedented challenge to government rule in President Bashar Assad's seat of power.

Neighboring Iraq called on its citizens living in Syria to return home, as the fighting overshadowed another round of diplomatic maneuvering to end the civil war, with special envoy Kofi Annan in Moscow in an attempt to rescue his faltering peace plan.

Plumes of gray smoke billowed over the Damascus skyline and helicopter gunships strafed the area, activists said — a sign the regime is growing desperate to push the rebels away from the heavily-guarded capital.

Terrified families fled the city or said they were prepared to leave at a moment's notice. Residents said they were packing "getaway bags" in case they had to run for their lives.

"My bag has my family's passports, our university degrees, some cash and medicine," a 57-year-old father of two told The Associated Press, asking that his name not be used for fear of reprisals. "It is very hard to imagine leaving your home and everything you worked to get, but it's a matter of life and death."

Clashes were concentrated in the neighborhoods of Kfar Souseh, Nahr Aisha, Midan and Qadam — a mixture of lower- and middle-to-upper-class districts in the city's southwest where street battles first erupted Sunday. Heavy clashes were also reported in Qaboun, a neighborhood in northeast Damascus.

"The streets are completely empty, the shops are closed. People are terrified of what's next," said Omar Qabouni, an activist in Qaboun. He said eight people were killed Tuesday in mortar and tank shelling by government forces. He estimated that about 300 rebels were taking part in the fighting.

Activists and residents said the fighting also reached new areas Tuesday, with brief firefights erupting in Sabeh Bahrat Square, Baghdad Street and Sahet Arnous in downtown Damascus, about 400 yards (meters) from the Syrian parliament.

The clashes broke up quickly as the rebels fled, but were a significant indicator of the rapidly spreading violence and the deep reach of the rebels as they become more confident and better armed.

The Damascus clashes were a sign the civil war was likely to worsen as the Syrian regime struggles to halt the opposition's growing momentum.

"The Syrian army's increasing deployment of artillery and helicopter gunships underscores that the regime is prepared to escalate its use of force concurrently with the armed opposition's improving capabilities," wrote Torbjorn Soltvedt, senior analyst at Maplecroft, a British-based risk analysis company in a report released Tuesday.

Syria's state-run news agency said troops were still chasing "terrorist elements" who had fled from Nahr Aisha to Midan. The Syrian regime refers to armed rebels as terrorists.

Troops also threw up multiple checkpoints and were searching cars in an effort to seal the capital off from rebellious areas in the suburbs.

"I can hear cracks of gunfire and some explosions from the direction of Midan," Damascus-based activist Maath al-Shami said via Skype. "Black smoke is billowing from the area."

An amateur video showed two armored personnel carriers mounted with heavy machine-guns, along with troops who were said to be advancing on an empty road toward Midan.

Another video showed a military helicopter flying over the Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun. The narrator could be heard saying the area was under "aerial bombardment," although the helicopter was not seen firing in the 30-second video.

The authenticity of the videos could not be independently verified.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and activist al-Shami said helicopters fired heavy machine guns during overnight clashes in the neighborhoods of Qadam and Hajar al-Aswad.

Al-Shami said residents of hard-hit areas were fleeing to safer neighborhoods where they were staying in schools and mosques. He added that many of the wounded were being treated at secret hospitals for fear they might be detained if taken to official ones.

Although the uprising began in March 2011 with largely peaceful protests, a government crackdown prompted many in the opposition to take up arms.

Now, the conflict is a full-blown civil war, and activists say more than 17,000 people have been killed. There are fears the violence and chaos could spread across the region.

On Tuesday, Israel's military intelligence chief warned that global jihadists have moved into Syrian territory bordering the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights and could soon use the area to stage attacks on the Jewish state.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said the kingdom was taking precautions to ward off a possible Syrian chemical attack, but declined to say what they were.

Also Tuesday, Iraq's government called for all its citizens in Syria to return home following the recent killing of two Iraqi journalists covering the conflict.

Thousands of Iraqis fled to Syria to escape widespread sectarian fighting during the worst of violence in their homeland between 2005 and 2007. Now, the traffic is heading the other way, with Iraqis and Syrian refugees heading east and out of the conflict that the International Red Cross has officially designated a civil war.

As the violence spirals out of control, diplomatic efforts to halt the bloodshed have seemingly come to a dead end. The U.S. and many Western nations have called on Assad to leave power, while Russia, China and Iran have stood by the regime.

Russia and China have veto power at the U.N. Security Council.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for rapid, unified action by the Security Council on Syria as he arrived in Beijing on Tuesday as part of a diplomatic push to get Russia and China to back a tougher response to attacks by Assad's regime.

Ban's trip comes ahead of a Security Council vote Wednesday on whether to allow sanctions and authorize actions to enforce them that could ultimately include the use of military force, which U.S. and European officials are playing down as a possibility.

A Western-backed resolution at the Security Council calls for sanctions and invokes Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter. A Chapter 7 resolution authorizes actions that can ultimately include the use of military force — something the Obama administration and European officials are playing down as a possibility.

As the violence in Syria escalates, the number of Syrians fleeing the bloodshed has swelled to some 112,000, according to the U.N. The U.N. refugee agency said women and children make up three-quarters of those has assisted in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

In addition, several recent defections by high-ranking Syrian officials have buoyed Western powers and anti-regime activists. Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, an Assad confidante and son of a former defense minister, who defected earlier this month, was confirmed Tuesday to be in France.

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Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue and Elizabeth A. Kennedy in Beirut, Ali Akbar Dareini in Tehran and Alexa Olesen in Beijing contributed to this report.

According to CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital Peter Schiff, the U.S. economy is heading for an economic crash that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park. Stimulus programs can delay this day of reckoning, but only for so long and only at the expense of making the eventual meltdown much, much worse.

Schiff, who famously warned investors about the housing and financial crisis in his 2007 book Crash Proof, says the Fed's palliative efforts during the housing meltdown have made the next crisis inevitable.

"We've got a much bigger collapse coming, and not just of the markets but of the economy," Schiff says in the attached clip. "It's like what you're seeing in Europe right now, only worse."

In this nightmare scenario detailed in The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy, the current economic pause is actually the beginning of a material slowdown or recession into year end. At that point, the Federal Reserve will unleash a third round of Quantitative Easing — weakening the dollar without jump-starting the economy. As a result of dollar weakness, import prices rise, pressing the margins of corporate America. Lower margins lead to heavy layoffs, sending millions of workers into unemployment during a time when they can least afford it. Banks fail, housing collapses, and taxes are raised in a futile effort to give the tapped-out government the capital to try yet more futile stimulus.

"That's when it really is going to get interesting, because that's when we hit our real fiscal cliff, when we're going to have to slash — and I mean slash — government spending," says Schiff.

Those cuts will not be at all unlike the draconian austerity measures in Greece, with programs like Social Security and Medicare being dramatically cut or possibly disappearing entirely. The easiest way to put it, is that everything you don't think could possibly happen in America will come to be.

"Alternatively, we can bail everybody out, pretend we can print our way out of a crisis, and, instead, we have runaway inflation, or hyper-inflation, which is going to be far worse than the collapse we would have if we did the right thing and just let everything implode," he offers.

So what should investors do to protect themselves? Schiff has three suggestions:

1. Get Out of Treasuries

The U.S. dollar is going to get trashed in Schiff's scenario. Locking in a yield on a government 10-year bond of 1.5% is a paltry return in the first place. Should inflation tick up to even 5%, a level much lower than that seen in the early 1980s, bond owners would have 3.5% less buying power at the end of every year. If they go to sell the bond, they'll only find buyers at a much lower price than what they paid.

2. Own the Right Stocks

With bonds and the dollar bearing the brunt of the pain, Schiff says stocks will outperform dramatically, provided you own the right ones. Exporters and multi-national corporations will benefit from a weak dollar. Better still would be to buy foreign stocks and avoid the U.S. entirely.

3. Buy Silver and Gold

Schiff says the recent weakness in these precious metals is just a pause as we wait for the other shoe to drop. Most of those on Main Street haven't even taken positions yet in gold or silver. Once they start dropping bonds and looking for a place to hide, the price of these metals will soar.

This Monday, July 16, 2012 satellite image provided by NASA shows calving, crescent-shaped crack at center, on the Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland. An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan tore off one of Greenland's largest glaciers. Scientists had been watching the 15-mile long crack in the floating ice shelf of the northerly Petermann Glacier for several years. On Monday NASA satellites showed it had broken completely, forming a 46 square mile iceberg. Petermann spawned an iceberg twice that size in 2010. (AP Photo/NASA, University of Delaware)

WASHINGTON (AP) — An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan tore off one of Greenland's largest glaciers, illustrating another dramatic change to the warming island.

For several years, scientists had been watching a long crack near the tip of the northerly Petermann Glacier. On Monday, NASA satellites showed it had broken completely, freeing an iceberg measuring 46 square miles.

A massive ice sheet covers about four-fifths of Greenland. Petermann Glacier is mostly on land, but a segment sticks out over water like a frozen tongue, and that's where the break occurred.

The same glacier spawned an iceberg twice that size two years ago. Together, the breaks made a large change that's got the attention of researchers.

"It's dramatic. It's disturbing," said University of Delaware professor Andreas Muenchow, who was one of the first researchers to notice the break. "We have data for 150 years and we see changes that we have not seen before."

"It's one of the manifestations that Greenland is changing very fast," he said.

Researchers suspect global warming is to blame, but can't prove it conclusively yet. Glaciers do calve icebergs naturally, but what's happened in the last three years to Petermann is unprecedented, Muenchow and other scientists say.

"This is not part of natural variations anymore," said NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot, who camped on Petermann 10 years ago.

Ohio State University ice scientist Ian Howat said there is still a chance it could be normal calving, like losing a fingernail that has grown too long, but any further loss would show it's not natural: "We're still in the phase of scratching our heads and figuring out how big a deal this really is."

Many of Greenland's southern glaciers have been melting at an unusually rapid pace. The Petermann break brings large ice loss much farther north than in the past, said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

If it continues, and more of the Petermann is lost, the melting would push up sea levels, he said. The ice lost so far was already floating, so the breaks don't add to global sea levels.

Northern Greenland and Canada have been warming five times faster than the average global temperature, Muenchow said. Temperatures have increased there by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 30 years, Scambos said.

The new iceberg is likely to follow the path of the one in 2010, Muenchow said. That broke apart into smaller icebergs headed north, then west and last year started landing in Newfoundland, he said.

It's more than glaciers in Greenland that are melting. Scientists also reported this week that the Arctic had the largest sea ice loss on record for June.

___ Online:

University of Delaware on the iceberg: http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2013/jul/glacier-071612.html

National Snow and Ice Data Center: http://nsidc.org/

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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears