NORTH KOREA - North Korea is clamping down on mobile phones and long distance telephone calls to prevent the spread of news about a worsening food crisis, according to the United Nations investigator on human rights for the isolated communist country.
ISRAEL - Israel's ultra-Orthodox Shas party refused to join a coalition government Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is seeking to assemble, increasing the chance of a general election in early 2009.
WASHINGTON - Banks borrowed in record amounts from the Federal Reserve's emergency lending facility over the past week, while investment banks drew loans at a slightly lower - but still brisk - pace, a fresh sign of the credit stresses bedeviling the country.
JERUSALEM - Hundreds of Jerusalemite worshipers on Tuesday repulsed extremist illegal Israeli Zionist settlers who tried to desecrate Al-Aqsa Mosque and its yards under police protection.
LONDON - Prospective parents will be able to screen embryos for almost any known genetic disease using a revolutionary "universal test" developed by British scientists, The Times has learnt.
USA - About half of American doctors in a new study regularly give their patients placebo pills without telling them.
VIENNA, AUSTRIA — OPEC oil ministers have decided to cut output by 1.5 million barrels a day as of next month. The oil cartel's move is an attempt to shore up sagging prices. Crude is selling for 50 percent less than this year's historic heights because the worldwide economic crisis has put a huge crimp in demand for crude.
WORLD - The sickness afflicting the global financial economy has entered a new and worrying phase. It started last summer with the closing down of big chunks of the wholesale money and securities markets.
USA - Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has called the recent turmoil in the global financial markets a "once in a century credit tsunami". Speaking before Congress, Mr Greenspan, who stood down as Fed chairman in 2006, said the crisis had left him "in a state of shocked disbelief".
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON - The House of Representatives approved a $700 billion bailout package for U.S. banks, under pressure from all sides as the effort to head off a spreading financial crisis hung in the balance.
UK - Feeling a lack of control over their life fuels many people's desire to impose order and structure on the world, scientists believe. The same feelings could also drive the impulse towards rituals and conspiracy theories, they claim.
USA - The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as the world's only superpower. On the practical level, the US is already stretched militarily, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now stretched financially. On the philosophical level, it will be harder for it to argue in favour of its free market ideas, if its own markets have collapsed.
USA - America is no longer up to shouldering the world's crises. But who is going to take its place? Russia, Brazil, China and India are all rising, but they are also competing with Europe and the US for finite natural resources. Only a common future - a "change through rapprochement" and not a "clash of futures" can carry us forward.
USA - Congress's initial rejection of the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout plan calls to mind an unhappy precedent. Back in 1930, the Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised duties on some 20,000 imported goods.
WASHINGTON - A group of Republicans in the House of Representatives said on Thursday they would seek an amendment to significantly reduce the size of a $700 billion Wall Street bailout package headed for a House vote soon.