Washington, Sept. 25: North Korea is reported to be planning to resume the reprocessing of plutonium, perhaps as soon as next week, raising concerns in Washington.

According to the New York Times, the country is on the verge of restarting a nuclear weapons program whose shutdown had earlier been portrayed by the White House as a significant diplomatic achievement.

U. S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that the United States still hoped to preserve a hard-won agreement that called for the North to dismantle its nuclear reactor.

But North Korea has refused to resume talks, and no new ones are planned.

Washington, September 25 : New estimates have suggested that India is poised to become the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions this year.

These are the findings of an analysis completed by the Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US.

Despite widespread concern about climate change, annual carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels and manufacturing cement have grown 38 percent since 
1992, from 6.1 billion tons of carbon to 8.5 billion tons in 2007.

Washington, Sept. 25: U. S. President George W. Bush appealed to the nation Wednesday night to support a 700 billion dollar plan to avert a financial meltdown on Wall Street.

He also invited both major presidential candidates – John McCain and Barack Obama to join him and Congressional leaders at the White House on Thursday to forge a bipartisan compromise.

New York, Sept 25: The meeting between Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin in New York today added a glamour quotient to US trip.

The meeting was held on the sidelines of the ongoing UN General Assembly session in New York.

The no show of Republican presidential nominee John McCain didn’t seem to matter as the glamorous new poster girl of the Grand Old Party met Manmohan Singh for half an hour.

No details of the meeting were released.

New York, Sept 25:

New York - South American leaders gathering at the United Nations this week have been touting their own new political union, which was hailed as a coming of age for the continent.

The regional leaders gathered for a closed-door meeting Wednesday of the Union of South American Nations, a collection of 12 countries.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who hosted the body's first emergency meeting last week, hailed the union as a signal that South America could finally manage its own problems.

Last week's Santiago summit, which dealt with a political crisis in Bolivia, "tells us that the values of democracy, dialogue, human rights and peace are becoming stronger than ever in Latin America," Bachelet said.