World

NEW YORK, (Reuters) – Mike Wallace, the grand inquisitor of CBS’s “60 Minutes” news show who once declared there was “no such thing as an indiscreet question,” has died at the age of 93, the network said yesterday.

JERUSALEM/DUBAI, (Reuters) – The United States and its allies are pressing for an end to Iran’s high-level uranium enrichment and the closure of a facility built deep under a mountain as talks on Tehran’s nuclear standoff with the West resume this week.

KADUNA, Nigeria, (Reuters) – A car bomb killed at least 16 people and wounded dozens more in the northern Nigerian town of Kaduna on Easter Sunday, after security officers stopped the vehicle carrying it from approaching a church, witnesses and police said.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian troops pounded opposition areas, activists said, killing 74 civilians in an offensive that has sent thousands of refugees surging into Turkey before next week’s UN-backed ceasefire aimed at staunching a year of bloodshed.

LILONGWE (Reuters) – Prominent women’s rights campaigner Joyce Banda was sworn in as Malawi’s president on Saturday, becoming southern Africa’s first female head of state and raising hopes for a fresh start in the small, poor nation after the death of her mercurial predecessor.

(Reuters) – A gunman shot five people, killing three of them, in a black neighbourhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a shooting spree that left residents on edge and sparked an intensive manhunt yesterday.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – An avalanche engulfed a Pakistani army battalion headquarters near the Indian border yesterday, burying 124 soldiers and 11 civilians, with no sign of survivors 17 hours later, the military said.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict, leading the world’s Catholics into Easter, said yesterday technological progress, in the absence of awareness of God and moral values, posed a threat to the world.

WASHINGTON,  (Reuters) – Every day, around 1,600 U.S. citizens of Latin American extraction are reaching 18 years of age – voting age – and adding to the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate.

NEW YORK/MOSCOW,  (Reuters) – Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer caught in an undercover sting by U.S.

BAMAKO,  (Reuters) – Mali’s desert Tuaregs proclaimed independence for what they call the state of Azawad today, a secession bid swiftly rejected by its African neighbours and foreign capitals from Paris to Washington.

AMSTERDAM,  (Reuters) – The Netherlands slammed as “totally unacceptable” a vote by lawmakers in its former colony Suriname granting amnesty to the suspected killers of 15 opponents of President Desi Bouterse 30 years ago.

BEIRUT/UNITED NATIONS, (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday that Syria’s conflict is deepening and attacks on civilian areas show no sign of abating, despite assurances from Damascus that it has begun withdrawing troops under an international peace plan.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, (Reuters) – The U.S. Coast Guard opened fire yesterday on a derelict Japanese fishing vessel washed out to sea by last year’s devastating tsunami in a bid to sink it and eliminate a threat to navigation, a spokesman for the agency said.\

(Reuters) – At least six people, including two of Somalia’s top sports officials, were killed when a female suicide bomber struck a ceremony at Mogadishu’s national theatre in an attack Islamist rebels said was aimed at assassinating government ministers.

BEIRUT – A senior Norwegian U.N. peacekeeper flies into Damascus today to try to broker an agreement that will allow observers to be deployed across Syria to monitor a ceasefire demanded by an international peace plan.

LONDON, (Reuters) – The GAVI international vaccines group is moving towards a price deal with drugmakers which could mean the supply of millions of doses of cut-price cervical cancer vaccines to developing nations.

BERLIN,  (Reuters) – Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass has attacked Israel as a threat to world peace and said it must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran, in a poem that led one German newspaper to brand him “the eternal anti-Semite”.

LOS ANGELES, (Reuters) – Whitney Houston drowned in a hot bathtub in a Beverly Hills hotel room with cocaine in her system and white powder nearby, a final coroner’s report revealed yesterday Detectives found white powdery substances, a rolled-up piece of paper, a small spoon and a mirror in the bathroom shortly after Houston’s naked body was found face down in the bathtub on Feb.

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – A prominent French academic, Richard Descoings, was found dead naked in a New York hotel room yesterday afternoon and New York police have opened an investigation into what they believe are the suspicious circumstances of his death.