Washington  - Republican senator John McCain announced Wednesday that he will suspend his campaign and return to Washington to work on emergency legislation designed to stem off the country's financial crisis.

In a brief statement to reporters, McCain said he has asked his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, to join him in the effort, and that he wanted to delay Friday's first presidential election debate between the two candidates.

Washington  - US President George W Bush congratulated Iraqi lawmakers for reaching an agreement Wednesday on an election law that will allow voters to chose new local governments in most provinces by the end of January.

"Today's action demonstrates the ability of Iraq's leaders to work together for the good of the Iraqi people and represents further progress on political reconciliation," Bush said in a statement.

Washington  - Amidst growing resistance in Congress to a proposed urgent, mammoth bailout plan for Wall Street, US President George W Bush was to speak later Wednesday on the economy, the White House said.

The speech at 9 pm (0100 GMT Thursday) comes after repeated calls from Congress and the public for a more complete explanation of why the White House is so anxious to push through an emergency 700- billion-dollar plan by week's end.

Washington  - The United States urged North Korea on Wednesday to back off plans to renew work at its nuclear reactor site, warning of further isolation if Pyongyang proceeds with kicking out international inspectors.

"We believe that if the North Koreans do so, it would only deepen its isolation," Rice told reporters in New York, where she was attending meetings on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Washington  - To Republican Senator Jim Bunning, it's "financial socialism" and "un-American."

To US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, it's the only way to rescue the country from certain economic collapse.

The White House's 700-billion-dollar rescue raft for Wall Street must navigate some challenging rapids in Congress as the proposal gets its first public airing this week.

Washington, September 24: Using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), scientists have attributed the cause of an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters to a cosmic "dark flow", which is the gravitational attraction of matter that lies across billions of light years, beyond the observable universe.

"The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," said lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We never expected to find anything like this," he added.