Washington/Mexico City  - Forecasters warned of widespread flooding along the US-Mexican border on Thursday as the weakened Tropical Storm Dolly continued to dump rain inland.

Dolly, which struck as a category two hurricane near South Padre Island, Texas on Wednesday, has weakened to a tropical storm with sustained winds of 75 kilometres per hour, the National Hurricane Centre in Miami said. It was expected to weaken further throughout the day.

Washington  - Monthly sales of existing homes dropped to their lowest level in 10 years in June as the Senate on Thursday considered a major rescue plan to shore up prices and help hundreds of thousands of homeowners still threatened with foreclosure.

Sales of previously-owned homes dropped 2.6 per cent from May to a seasonally-adjusted rate of 4.86 million units, more than 15 per cent below June 2007, the National Association of Realtors said.

Washington, July 24: A new research has suggested that wealthy nations willing to collectively spend about 1 billion dollars annually could prevent the emission of roughly half a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year for the next 25 years, which can put an end to a tenth of the tropical deforestation in the world.

If adopted, this type of program could have potential to reduce global carbon emissions by between 2 and 10 percent.

The calculations, based on three different forestry and land-use models, provide the best estimates so far of how much it would cost developed nations to participate in a program called “avoided deforestation” to reduce worldwide carbon emissions.

Washington, July 24: A new study has suggested that though dinosaurs may have been the largest land animals of the Cretaceous period, but they were probably conspicuously absent from the ‘terrestrial revolution’ of that time, in which the number of land species rose rapidly.

According to a report in New Scientist, Graeme Lloyd at the University of Bristol, UK, carried out the study, along with his team.

They studied all of the existing dinosaur taxonomic literature to produce a ‘supertree’ of dinosaur species.

The new supertree, which includes 440 of the 600 known dinosaur species, shows that the dinosaurs evolved rapidly during their first 50 million years.

Washington - US President George W Bush summed up the problems in the US economy by telling a private gathering that "Wall Street got drunk" and is now suffering a "hangover."

"Wall Street got drunk - that's one reason I told you turn the cameras off - it got drunk and now it's got a hangover," Bush said at the fundraiser in Houston. "The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments."

Washington - Salim Hamdan was so close to Osama bin Laden that the terrorist ringleader threw a feast to celebrate the former driver's wedding, an FBI witness who interviewed Hamdan testified in court on Wednesday, according to a report by USA Today.

Bin Laden "definitely trusts him with his life," Ali Soufan told the court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the first US military tribunal since World War II got underway this week.