Los Angeles - The single mother of newborn octuplets and six other small children is moving out of her mother's home and getting a team of charity nurses to help care for her formidable brood, People magazine reported Tuesday.

The mother, Nadya Suleman, has come in for widespread criticism for her obsession with having babies even though she has no visible means of support. But the new arrangements will allow the children to get adequate care without the need for a massive government baby bailout.

Oslo  - A Norwegian insurance company Tuesday posted a reward for information securing the safe return of a painting by German master Lucas Carnach, the elder, stolen over weekend, reports said.

According to some estimates the painting was worth at least 15 million kroner (2.1 million dollars) while the reward was 500,000 kroner.

The over 400-year-old painting was stolen from Larvik Church, some 105 kilometres southwest of Oslo. The congregation has owned it for over 300 years.

Copenhagen - Fast rising sea levels that pose a future threat to populations living in coastal regions was one of the topics debated Tuesday when hundreds of international researchers gathered to a three-day meeting in Denmark.

The opening of the meeting was attended by among others Rajendra K Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations climate body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for work on climate change.

Kampala - The Ugandan army said Tuesday it is close to defeating the rebels in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo and stopped them from massacring civilians there since the start of its offensive in December.

UN and humanitarian agencies say that Uganda's Lords Resistance Army (LRA) guerrillas massacred up to 1,000 people in the north- eastern region of the DR Congo several weeks after the joint operation against them by Ugandan, Congolese and Sudanese forces began mid-December 2008.

Los Angeles - A show puppy owned by celebrity style guru Martha Stewart was one of 17 dogs killed in a huge explosion at a boarding kennel in Pennsylvania, according to a posting Monday on Stewart's blog.

The blast occurred shortly after a tanker made a delivery of propane gas to the Pazzazz Pet Boarding Kennels in Pennsylvania. The puppy, named Genghis Khan was adopted by Stewart in December when he was seven weeks old.

London  - A portrait of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), believed to be the only surviving painting made of him during his lifetime, was unveiled in London Monday.

The artwork is believed to have been painted in 1610, six years before Shakespeare's death, when he was aged 46. The identity of the painter is unknown.

The newly-identified work remained in the same family for centuries and was inherited by art restorer Alec Cobbe, scholars told a London news conference Monday.