Washington  - General Motors, under the government's gun to prove its viability and bracing for a worsening economic downturn, Thursday announced an unprecedented series of nationwide plant shut- downs over the summer aimed at reducing ballooning inventory.

The company said it would shut down 13 assembly operations in North America for multiple weeks, staggered across the summer, with the aim of removing 190,000 vehicles from the production schedule for second and third quarters of this year.

Washington - A Florida pharmacy that mixed medication for 21 polo horses before they mysteriously died over the weekend said Thursday it incorrectly mixed the substance, the Palm Beach Post reported online.

The horses, which belonged to the Venezuelan team La Lechuza owned by Venezuelan multimillionaire Victor Vargas, died shortly before a quarter-finals match was to begin Sunday at the 105th US Open Polo Championship in Wellington, Florida.

Washington - US President Barack Obama marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday by warning that preventing genocide in the future depends on the world's willingness to confront hatred wherever it arises.

"Bearing witness is not the end of our obligation. It's just the beginning. We know that evil has yet to run its course on earth," Obama said. "We've seen it, in this century, in the mass graves and the ashes of villages burned to the ground and children used as soldiers and rape used as a weapon of war."

New York  - The tool maker Black & Decker barely scraped into the black with its first quarter results as floundering European demand and the rising dollar ate into profit margins, company results released Thursday showed.

The US firm is projecting diminishing returns for the rest of the year, after earnings dropped by more than 90 per cent from the first quarter last year, to 5 million dollars. Revenues were down by 30 per cent to 1.1 billion dollars.

The results were worse than the firm had expected, prompting an even harsher search to save money, the company said.

Washington - World Bank President Robert Zoellick on Thursday warned that protectionism was rising as governments battle to keep domestic industries alive, and called on wealthy nations to invest more money in social services for poor countries struck by the global recession.

"The danger of protectionism is increasing," Zoellick said at a press conference in Washington, ahead of a semi-annual meeting of members of the World Bank and its sister lender, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this weekend.

According to the findings of a study by the researchers from HSPH - Harvard School of Public Health -, the height of the mother has a significant bearing on the health of a child. The study said that children born to women shorter than 4'9" are 70 percent more likely to die, mostly before attaining the age of five.