VATICAN - In 1947, a young Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla made the pilgrimage to a small town in Puglia to have his confession heard by Padre Pio, the mysterious Italian monk with the Christ-like stigmata wounds on his hands.
SIERRA MADRE, CALIFORNIA - About 100 homes were being evacuated as a 100-acre wildfire crept closer to foothill neighborhoods near Pasadena on a hot, dry Saturday in Southern California, authorities said.
LONDON - A pipeline carrying nearly half of Britain's oil was closed on Sunday as a strike over pensions began at the neighbouring Grangemouth refinery in Scotland, operator BP said.
RENO, NEVADA - Scientists urged residents of northern Nevada's largest city to prepare for a bigger event as the area continued rumbling Saturday after the largest earthquake in a two-month-long series of temblors.
NEW YORK - The world is an odd place. A tight global food situation with record-high grain prices presents the possibility of increasing malnutrition, perhaps famine, in parts of Africa and South Asia. Yet an estimated 1.6 billion adults, about a quarter of the world's 6.7 billion people, are overweight, some of them obese.
LONDON - Pro-choice campaigners mark 40 years of legal abortion in Britain next week, but say their hard-won right is under pressure from pro-life activists trying to lower the 24-week limit for the termination of pregnancy.
LONDON - Ration cards. Genetically modified crops. The end of pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap supermarkets.
CAIRO, EGYPT - The Palestinian group Hamas is proposing a six-month cease-fire with Israel, saying it will stop firing rockets out of Gaza if the Jewish state simultaneously lifts its blockade of the coastal strip, Egypt's state run MENA news agency said Thursday night.
WASHINGTON - The United States is convinced that North Korea helped Syria build a secret nuclear reactor, the White House said on Thursday.
LONDON - Britain was hit by the most wide-ranging wave of strikes in a decade on Thursday, with more than 100,000 public sector employees, from teachers to coastguards, striking against the Labour government.
SWITZERLAND - Credit Suisse has reported a loss for the first three months of the year, hit by its exposure to the credit markets.
BANGKOK - Rice prices in Thailand, the world's top exporter, surged to $1,000 (500 pounds) a tonne on Thursday as concerns about food security first triggered by a handful of Asian export bans spread as far as the United States.
BRAZIL - Brazil's discoveries of what may be two of the world's three biggest oil finds in the past 30 years could help end the Western Hemisphere's reliance on Middle East crude, Strategic Forecasting Inc. said.
UK - Cheap food is being dressed up as top-quality produce in a vast fraud costing shoppers £7billion a year, it is claimed today. There is mounting evidence of battery farm eggs being sold as free range, farmed fish passed off as wild and inferior meat labelled as organic.
USA/GB - Most scientists involved in Aids research believe that a vaccine against HIV is further away than ever and some have admitted that effective immunisation against the virus may never be possible, according to an unprecedented poll conducted by The Independent.