Baghdad/Mosul  - Six consecutive blasts targeting predominantly Shiite neigbhourhoods of Baghdad killed at least 36 people and wounded more than 100 more on Monday, police and local media said.

The attacks, which coincided with the latest in a near-daily string of deadly bomb attacks in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, came two weeks after a car bomb killed 26 people in a market in a predominantly Shiite al-Shaab neighbourhood of Baghdad, and a week after Sunni militiamen clashed with Iraqi security forces in a the Baghdad slum of Fadhil.

Cairo - What a difference a year makes in Egypt.

Last April 6, teargas filled the streets of the Nile Delta industrial town of Mahalla al-Kobra as rioters firebombed buildings, hurled rocks at riot police, and toppled a freestanding poster of Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak. At least two people were killed in clashes with the police and dozens more were wounded.

The riots followed violence in bread queues at government-subsidized bakeries, as spiraling wheat prices drove more of the country's urban poor to rely on subsidized bread.

Washington - A US judge on Monday cleared the way for John Demjanjuk, a war-crimes suspect from the Nazi era, to be deported to Germany.

The US Immigration Court in Arlington, Virginia, lifted a stay on the deportation that it had issued Friday.

The court declaration means Demjanjuk could be deported as early as Wednesday, but his lawyers were expected to seek a further stay.

Mexico City  - An inmate who was serving time for drug trafficking was murdered and chopped up in pieces in a prison in the western Mexican town of Uruapan, authorities in the state of Michoacan said Monday.

The guards at the prison, some 400 kilometres west of Mexico City, noticed the man's absence when they went through the list of inmates after visiting hours Sunday afternoon, a spokesman for the Michoacan public prosecutor's office told dpa.

L'Aquila, Italy  - Rescue workers, paramedics and soldiers spread out across central Italy Monday, sifting through the remains of buildings that were nearly decimated by an earthquake that struck in the pre-dawn hours.

The quake, which reportedly reached 6.2 on the Richter scale, left 90 people dead in a region about 90 kilometres north-east of Rome, according to the Italian news agency Ansa, citing rescue workers.

Washington  - The United States will push for more restrictions on tourism to the North and South Poles to protect the regions' natural environment and avoid the worst effects of global warming, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.

Opening a nearly two-week summit bringing together the two diplomatic bodies that govern the Arctic and Antarctic, Clinton warned that protecting the region was crucial to stabilizing the global climate.