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.

Harare - A month-long standoff between Zimbabwe's political parties over the implementation of a power-sharing deal appeared to be at an end Thursday, with sources saying President Robert Mugabe and his arch-rival Morgan Tsvangirai had agreed on a composition of a unity government.

"An acceptable compromise has been reached," a senior official from Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa on condition of anonymity, on leaving the talks at an hotel in Harare.

Moscow - The head of Europe's election-monitoring mission to Azerbaijan said Thursday there was a "lack of robust competition" on the ballot and President Ilham Aliyev's landslide re-election feel short of democratic norms.

With the only real opposition boycotting the vote, Aliyev sailed to an easy win on Wednesday, sealing near 90 per cent of the Caspian states 4.7 million votes.

"The election did not reflect all principals of a meaningful democratic election," Boris Frlec, the head of the OSCE's election observer mission, told journalist in Baku one day after the balloting.