New York - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday received an all-clear to run for a third term, after the City Council voted to extend a term limits law from eight to 12 years.

Bloomberg, a successful billionaire and founder of the financial wire services bearing his name, demanded a third four-year term so he can continue to lead the city through the severe economic crisis affecting Wall Street.

San Francisco - Democratic candidate Barack Obama was rushing to the bedside of his ailing grandmother in Hawaii Thursday, taking a break from intense campaigning to make sure he saw her before she died.

Madelyn Dunham, 85, was a formative figure in the life of the White House frontrunner, helping Obama's single mother raise him during his teenage years when his own mother was working abroad.

Washington - A large and growing, but underestimated, voter bloc of Asian and Latino immigrants could play a pivotal role in the presidential elections, which are often decided by very small voting margins, a report released Thursday said.

This increasingly influential group, who were 8.6 per cent of all registered voters in 2006, are described in the report as New Americans, comprised of naturalized Americans or those immigrants who have become US citizens, as well as immigrants' children born in the US after 1965.

Bogota - Colombia was experiencing a curious controversy Thursday, after a photograph of US presidential candidate Barack Obama was printed on the tickets of a lottery with a jackpot of some 253,000 dollars.

The photograph of the US Democratic Party candidate was used by the lottery in the central Colombian province of Meta as a "tribute" to blacks, according to lottery manager Magdalena Gonzalez.