Washington - Calling Senator Barack Obama the "right man for a perilous moment," the Washington Post newspaper Friday endorsed the Democratic candidate for the US presidency, adding its national weight to 39 other regional newspapers - including the Boston Globe and St Louis Post Dispatch - that have declared for the centre-left candidate.

New York - An international human rights watchdog on Friday accused the Singapore government of trying to silence critics with unfair defamation lawsuits.

Elaine Pearson, Human Rights Watch's deputy director for Asia, said the lawsuits, used against opposition politicians and critical media, make "a mockery of Singapore's claim to be a model democracy."

"Opposition criticism of the government is an essential ingredient of a democratic political system," she added, urging the wealthy city-state to stop its limitations on free political speech.

Washington - Democrat Barack Obama may seem more comfortable discussing his Christian faith than any presidential candidate from his party since Jimmy Carter in 1976, but his focus on reaching out to religious voters appears to be doing little to swing a key voting bloc - evangelicals.

Evangelical Christians make up about 20 per cent of the electorate and have been among the backbone of the Republican Party for nearly 30 years, pushing the party further to the right on social issues, with their opposition to abortion and gay marriage.

Harare - Despite earlier hopeful signs, the month-long standoff between Zimbabwe's political parties over the implementation of a power-sharing deal continued Thursday after three days of talks between President Robert Mugabe and his arch-rival Morgan Tsvangirai.

New York - Austria, Iceland, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, and Uganda are competing for five seats on the UN Security Council in an election on Friday in the UN General Assembly.

The five council seats that will be vacated on December 31 are now occupied by Belgium, Indonesia, Italy, Panama and South Africa. Those countries are ending their two-year terms in the body that has authority on issues of peace and security around the world.

Washington - With only 19 days left before presidential elections, Republicans are mounting challenges to voter registrations in key battleground states such as Ohio, where election officials have asked the US Supreme Court to intervene.

The challenges mostly involve newly registered voters, and would likely hurt Democratic nominee Barack Obama, whose campaign has worked to register huge numbers of new voters around the country.