WORLD

President Barack Obama breaks a precedent of not meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama during his five-day trip to Washington, but intends to meet the exiled leader sometime in December after his November Summit with Chinese president Hu Jintao.

The House of Representatives is expected to debate financial regulatory reform next month, Democratic leader Steny Hoyer said on Tuesday.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed the United States would keep relentless pressure on al Qaeda and ensure extremist networks, which he called a principle threat, do not find safe havens overseas.

The olive branch is a symbol of peace in the Middle East, but for Yusuf Sabaani the thousands of tiny olive seedlings he has just planted are a more tangible image of his dream for the future of his children.

Iraq's Sunni Arab parliament speaker called on Tuesday for members of the Iraqi military under former leader Saddam Hussein to be respected for their sacrifices and have their pensions increased.

A minibus bomb exploded at a market in the western Iraqi town of Amiriya on Tuesday, killing at least nine people and wounding 31, a local official said.

Turkish police fired tear gas and used water cannon to disperse hundreds of people protesting against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank during their annual meetings in Istanbul Tuesday.

Iran plans to use a new generation of faster centrifuges to enrich uranium at a newly-revealed nuclear site, its atomic energy chief said in remarks published on Tuesday.

A pioneer in fiber optics and two scientists who figured out how to turn light into electronic signals -- work that paved the way for the Internet age -- were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday.

Home theaters are passe. Home offices are in.

President Barack Obama will not meet the Dalai Lama during his five-day trip to the U.S. capital beginning on Monday, the first time in 18 years the exiled Tibetan leader has visited Washington without seeing the president.

Democratic hopes for a quick Senate Finance Committee vote on a broad U.S. healthcare overhaul were dashed on Monday as budget experts took longer than expected with their estimate of the bill's cost.

A senior U.S. Treasury Department official said on Tuesday that if Iran fails to demonstrate that it is not seeking nuclear weapons it may face sweeping sanctions from the rest of the world.

Health workers doused the Indonesian city of Padang with disinfectant to ward off disease outbreaks and helicopters dropped aid to survivors six days after a devastating earthquake

Rescue workers with boats and helicopters struggled on Tuesday to deliver rations to about 5 million victims of flooding triggered by torrential rains in southern India.

President Robert Mugabe said on Tuesday Zimbabwe wanted friendly relations with Western countries who have been critical of it in the past.

A senior Palestinian official on Tuesday accused Israel of deliberately creating an extremely dangerous situation in East Jerusalem, to trigger violence, justify a crackdown and tighten its grip on the disputed city.

Police in Uganda have arrested one of the most wanted suspects from Rwanda's 1994 genocide, Idelphonse Nizeyimana, a senior police source said Tuesday.

Tropical storm Parma stalled for two days off northwestern Philippines, was slowly heading toward the country's tobacco-producing region on Tuesday, after killing at least 22 people.

North Korea on Tuesday signaled it could return to nuclear disarmament talks it had declared dead six months ago, but a report it was near restoring its atomic plant underlined the secretive state would keep the stakes high.

NATO forces said Tuesday they had killed more that 100 fighters in a huge weekend battle in eastern Afghanistan in which eight Americans died, the deadliest firefight for U.S. troops in more than a year.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates blamed the Taliban's revival on a past failure to deploy enough troops to Afghanistan and said U.S. forces would not withdraw whatever the result of President Barack Obama's strategy review.

China's retail sales had reached 14 billion yuan (about 2 million Dollars) during the first three days of China National day Holiday, up 15 percent from the same period of last year, China Ministry of Commerce said yesterday.

President Barack Obama was pressured to postpone a meeting with Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama until after his summit with Chinese leader Hu Jintao next month, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

The new Pakistani Taliban chief released a new video clip Sunday on Pakistani television, vowing to retaliate against the U.S. and Pakistan.

President Barack Obama gathered doctors from every U.S. state at the White House on Monday to press his case for healthcare reform in a week when the sweeping overhaul could clear a major hurdle in Congress.

A court in Azerbaijan sentenced a group of militant Islamists including two Lebanese men to between 12 and 15 years in jail on Monday for plotting attacks on the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Baku.

As many as 6.2 million Ethiopians need emergency humanitarian assistance due to severe drought, an official from the Oxfam charity said on Monday.

The European Union and Brazil will put pressure on the United States Tuesday to set out its demands to conclude the Doha round of world trade talks in 2010 to boost dwindling world trade, a draft document showed.