Washington - US President George W Bush Fridady pledged that the US government will tackle the root of the financial turmoil through a massive intervention that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Bush said a comprehensive plan was crucial to keeping the financial sector from total collapse and freezing the availability of credit to US consumers.

"The American economy is facing unprecedented challenges. We are responding with unprecedented action," Bush said in remarks broadcast from the White House.

Washington - Australia, Britain and the US have moved to curb a stock-trading practice called short-selling to help put a brake on the down-slide of world stock markets.

For the US, the move is "intended to prevent investors from driving down the price of particular stocks for their own personal gain," warned US President George W Bush Friday morning.

He said that "anyone engaging in illegal transactions will be caught and prosecuted."

Washington  - US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Friday said it would take a massive government intervention of "hundreds of billions" of dollars to prevent a total collapse of the financial sector in the United States.

Paulson said he would be working with Congress over the weekend on legislation that would allow the government to buy up banks' mortgage-related assets, which have plummeted in value and are at the centre of the current financial turmoil.

Washington - The United States on Friday unveiled part of a massive, comprehensive plan to help resolve the ongoing US financial crisis and prevent a rush of new bank failures in the coming weeks.

The US Treasury announced a 50-billion-dollar guarantee programme for the money-market mutual fund industry, the first in a series of moves that could come Friday after overnight talks with congressional leaders. US media reported the entire rescue package could cost as much as 500 billion dollars.

Islamabad, Sept 19 : Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has said that in the wake of the recent, rather ongoing, US strikes on its soil, the rules of engagement between Pakistan and the US in the war on terrorism needed to be reviewed.

“We can also sit as a government and see if they need to be reviewed,” said Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, while complaining that Pakistan had not been informed about Wednesday’s attack in South Waziristan.

Washington, September 19 : Studying the mating and nesting practices of a common Australian frog, Monash University researchers have found that they partner up to eight males sequentially, the highest recorded of any vertebrate.

Research leader Phillip Byrne, from the university’s School of Biological Sciences, has revealed that the new behaviour observed in the frog species Bibron''s toadlet
(Pseudophryne bibronii) had never been detected in any frog species to date.

"Our study revealed that females made the active decision to distribute their eggs between the nests of up to eight different males," he said.