U.S. President Barack Obama called Monday for stricter regulation in the financial industries and warned firms that are considering large bonuses for their executives to remember the debt they owe to taxpayers and the federal government for bailing them out last year.

The young students taught by Maruca, who has been giving free painting classes to children in a town in Argentina's pampas for the last 50 years, have won more than 1,000 international prizes for their artwork.

The International Atomic Energy Agency says its present objective regarding Iran is to try to determine whether the intelligence documents purportedly showing a covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme from 2001 to 2003 are authentic or not. The problem, according to its reports, is that Iran refuses to help clarify the issue.

A broad range of projects in Brazil are using ballet and folk dances, classical and popular music, theatre, circus arts, capoeira - an Afro-Brazilian combination of dance and martial arts - fashion, visual arts and the audiovisual media to reach disadvantaged and at-risk children.

'Why should we surrender ourselves to the invasion of highly subsidised European goods? What will be the impact of capital outflows because of strategic services such as telecommunication, port, energy and water services being liberalised and privatised in the interest of European companies?'

Monrovia’s highest hill, the long sliver of Atlantic Ocean shoreline at the mouth of the Mesurado River, with its aqua blue waves, golden sand and wooden fishing boats, looks like paradise.

When police in western Gujarat state claimed to have shot dead four members of the militant Lashkar-e-Toiba (Soldiers of God) group, otherwise known as LeT, including a 19-year-old girl student, on Jun. 15, 2004, in an ‘encounter,’ few believed them.

The mile-long stretch that divides Israel's Erez border crossing into northern Gaza from the Hamas police border post is eerily quiet. But the mountains of rubble, twisted metal and craters which remain following Israel's intensive bombing campaign in January serve as a stark reminder that war between the two bitter enemies is still a possibility.

With a generating capacity of only 190 megawatts, the Dak Mi 4 hydropower project being constructed in the central Vietnamese province of Quang Nam is small by international standards.

There is mounting evidence that the government of Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar'adua is set to launch a full-scale offensive in the Niger Delta when a ceasefire declared by rebels ends on Sep. 15.