IRAN announced yesterday it has successfully launched a research rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and worms into space – a feat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said showed Iran could defeat the West in the battle of technology.

CHINA has contingency plans to dispatch troops into North Korea and secure nuclear weapons in the event of instability in the hardline communist state, according to US experts who have talked to Chinese military researchers.

FOLLOWING the revival of a Middle East peace process between Israel and the Palestinians at Annapolis on Tuesday, France said it will host a donor conference in Paris on December 17.

Facing rising violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, US President George Bush is pressing European allies for more help in a rush of high-stakes diplomacy amid growing public impatience with the war.

The plot thickens over the mysterious backroom deals that have quietly handed the Kremlin control of the embattled Yukos oil giant’s most important production unit – an apparently secret, no-bid sale to Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft.

"I have a sense it's a horrendous number of lives lost." -- New York City