Barack Obama on Tuesday renewed his promise to make a decisive break with George W. Bush on the environment, using a summit convened by Arnold Schwarzenegger to promise a "new chapter in America's leadership on climate change".

Japan beefed up security at the health ministry and urged top officials to take extra caution yesterday after the murders of a former vice-health minister and his wife, and a stabbing of another former bureaucrat's wife.

Russian lawmakers yesterday approved the second reading of a bill extending the presidential term from four to six years, a move some observers say could pave the way for Vladimir Putin's return to the office.

A grand jury in South Texas indicted US Vice-President Dick Cheney and former attorney-general Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday for "organized criminal activity" related to alleged abuse of inmates in private prisons.

A Colombian woman has received the world's first tailor-made trachea windpipe transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own stem cells to prevent her body rejecting it, an international research team reported yesterday.

WASHINGTON: Stem cells from tiny embryos can be used to restore lost hearing and vision in animals, researchers said on Tuesday in what they believe is a first step toward helping people.

Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has been ordered to stand trial for his role in an alleged plot to smear Nicolas Sarkozy, now president, when they were rival ministers.

Flight controllers were revamping plans yesterday for the remaining spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour's visit to the international space station, after a crucial tool bag floated out to space during a repair trip.

An 8-year-old boy accused in the shooting deaths of his father and another man said in a police interview released on Tuesday that he did not fire the first shots at the men but later shot them so they wouldn't suffer.

Oldest polar bear dies at 42

Prostitution clients to be illegal

Clinton foundation raises $124m

In high seas and heavy rain, the supertanker Kasagisan was steaming through the Malacca Strait in February when it was suddenly surrounded by six small boats.

The US navy yesterday issued a harrowing picture of Chinese sailors being held at gunpoint on a fishing vessel hijacked by Somali pirates off Kenya last week.

The mounting threat posed by Somali pirates is causing waves in many seafaring nations, but there has been little effect in the Philippines, which supplies the world up to 40 percent of its sailors.

Researchers studying a rare and endangered species of penguin have uncovered a previously unknown species that disappeared about 500 years ago.

On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists for the first time in more than eight decades have observed a living pygmy tarsier, one of the planet's smallest and rarest primates.

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