New York - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned Tuesday that a series of global crises were threatening the world at a time when the leadership to address the turmoil was lacking.

In a stark address before the General Assembly, he said: "We all recognize the perils of our current passage. We face a global financial crisis. A global energy crisis. A global food crisis."

But "we also face a crisis of a different sort ... a challenge of global leadership," Ban said.

New York  - The US chemical concern DuPont announced Tuesday that it was elevating executive vice president Ellen Kullman to the position of president as of October 1 and chief executive officer effective January 1, 2009.

The 52-year-old Kullman, who has worked for DuPont since 1988, is to replace Charles O Holliday Jr, a 38-year veteran of the 206-year- old company based in Wilmington, Delaware. Holliday has been CEO from 1998.

Kullman, in her role as group vice president of the company's safety and protection unit from 2002 to 2006, helped increase revenues in the unit from 3.5 billion dollars to 5.5 billion dollars.

Washington, Sep 23 : Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden has said that a campaign ad that mocked Republican presidential candidate John McCain as computer illiterate was “terrible” and would not have been done had he known about it.

Obama, McCain’s Democratic rival, launched the ad earlier this month, part of an aggressive push to slow McCain’s rise in the polls after he chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

Washington, Sep 23 : Ahmed Zaid Zuhair, a detainee in Camp 6 of the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, has claimed that two guards had harassed him, with one threatening to kill him and quarter his body; and the other threatening to cut off his ears and nose.

One guard then read through his legal correspondence, confiscating several documents, the Christian Science Monitor quoted Zuhair, as saying.

On July 18, Zuhair, a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, wrote to his legal team in the US, terminating all written communication.

“Right now, my state of mind is not normal because I have been threatened with death by a guard,” Zuhair wrote. “Do not send any more papers after today.”

London, Sept 23 : Britain might soon withdraw its troops from Iraq, going by UK Defence Secretary’s statement that a “turning point” has been reached in Iraq.

According to the Mirror, at the Labour Party''s annual conference Des Browne said, "The Iraqi armed forces, supported by British and U. S. forces, have taken on and defeated the militia in Basra."

While echoing Prime Minister Gordon Brown''s statement in July that there would be a "fundamental change of mission" early next year, a phrase understood to mean a withdrawal of troops, Browne said, "We have reached a turning point in our involvement."

Washington, September 23  An exhibition in the Vatican, which is displaying hundreds of artifacts, has suggested that the mysterious Neolithic people made optical art.

According to a report in Discovery News, the exhibition, which is being held at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in the Vatican, introduces a mysterious Neolithic people who are now believed to have forged Europe''s first civilization.

Archaeologists have named these people "Cucuteni-Trypillians" after the villages of Cucuteni, near Lasi, Romania and Trypillia, near Kiev, Ukraine, where the first discoveries of this ancient civilization were made more than 100 years ago.