A defiant Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich named a political trailblazer to Barack Obama’s Senate seat, a surprise move that put the governor’s opponents in the uncomfortable position of trying to block his choice from becoming the Senate’s only black member.

PRESIDENT-elect Barack Obama hasn’t even stepped into office and already a scandal is threatening to dog him.

A teenage girl was locked in a Brazilian prison cell with 21 men who would only let her eat in return for sex, authorities said.

A roadside bomb exploded near a minibus full of Shiite civilians today, killing at least three people and wounding nine as they went to visit relatives south of Baghdad, police said.

Seven former Florida boot camp guards and a nurse were acquitted today of manslaughter in the death of a 14-year-old black boy who was hit and kicked in a videotaped altercation with the guards.

A US man convicted in the shooting death of a convenience store clerk became the 400th person to be executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982.

Hurricane Dean raked the Mexican mainland Wednesday and battered evacuated oil platforms, forcing thousands to flee as it regained some of the force it unleashed on the Yucatan Peninsula.

With the search for bodies over at the site of an interstate bridge collapse, US authorities will now focus on removing tons of wreckage from the Mississippi River.

US Democratic presidential contenders sought to underscore their differences with Republicans on gay and lesbian rights, but leading candidates also faced sharp questions on their reluctance to embrace marriage for same-sex couples.

Fears that an interstate bridge collapse in Minnesota might produce dozens of deaths eased today as US authorities said the number of missing, once thought to be as many as 30, was just eight.

A male suicide bomber carried out the attack in Turkey that killed six people and injured 91 others, the governor of Ankara announced.

A British pilot and his Pakistani passenger were killed when their small two-seater plane crashed in northern Turkey, the local governor said today.

At least 21 civilians were killed during an airstrike in support of Nato forces fighting with insurgents in southern Afghanistan, a senior government official said today.

A top Iraqi insurgent leader today claimed in an audiotape posted online that his al-Qaida-linked group had begun manufacturing its own rockets.

Coastal Long Island in the US could see some of its worst flooding in 14 years when a hard-blowing nor'easter begins whipping through New York today, officials said.

The governor of Kansas has signed a law today barring protesters from funerals in an attempt to curtail a fundamentalist church that pickets military funerals, claiming the deaths are God’s punishment for homosexuality.

Former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black’s racketeering and fraud trial is getting under way in the US.

A suicide attacker blew himself up at a hospital opening ceremony in eastern Afghanistan today, wounding at least two NATO soldiers and a health worker.

The new governor of Afghanistan’s largest opium-producing province today said he supports a US-backed plan to spray herbicide on lucrative poppy fields, and that he will ask Taliban fighters to support the government.

ARNOLD Schwarzenegger will need crutches, screws to secure his thigh bone and several weeks of recovery after undergoing surgery on his broken leg, his surgeon said.

Nato has launched an investigation into allegations that British forces opened fire on civilians, killing one and wounding six, after a suicide attack earlier this month.

Former James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan and other celebrities gathered in the US yesterday to protest against plans for a natural gas facility 14 miles off the California coast.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer cruised to landslide victories in New York state’s Democratic primary day, turning back long-shot challengers on a night that produced a string of lopsided state-wide contests.

Levees around the vulnerable city of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, held against the swollen Susquehanna River today, ending an evacuation order for 200,000 people.

US-led coalition aircraft killed up to 80 suspected Taliban militants in a night airstrike on a rebel stronghold in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said today. The local governor said 16 civilians also died.

After a break in a century-old earth dam released a thunderous torrent of water across the US Hawaiian island of Kauai, killing at least two people, crews began to monitor other dams feared to be unsafe.

A car bomb exploded in a Shiite holy city and 13 members of one Shiite family were gunned down north-east of the capital today in a surge of attacks that killed at least 30 people despite heightened security aimed at curbing sectarian violence following the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine.

Rescue teams abandoned the search for survivors of a Philippines landslide that buried a farming village a week ago, and will focus their efforts on helping evacuees who lost their homes in the disaster, an official said today.

Uncertain if they were even digging in the right place, rescue workers in the Philippines today tried to find a mud-swamped school mid fears that time already may have run out for finding survivors of a massive landslide.

California prepared last night to execute its third death row inmate in as many months. For the first time an anaesthetist was present to minimise the condemned man’s pain.

HIGH-TECH gear detected “signs of life” yesterday at the site of an elementary school buried under mud that swept down a hillside soaked by rain in the eastern Philippines, the provincial governor said.

High-tech equipment has detected sounds at the site of a Philippine school buried by a landslide, US and Malaysian officials said today.

Rescue workers were burrowing through debris clogging a Mexican coal mine early today, a desperate effort to free 65 miners who had been trapped for more than a day by a gas explosion.

Rescue workers held little hope today of finding more survivors from a devastating Philippines landslide, saying a farming village was swallowed whole by a wall of mud and boulders that killed up to 1,800 people.

Twelve miners caught in an explosion in a West Virginia coal mine were miraculously found alive more than 41 hours after a blast that ultimately claimed the life of another miner, the governor said.

Turkish authorities have ordered poultry farmers in a quarantined area in western Turkey to hand over birds for culling or face fines and possible jail sentences as Turkey tried to contain an outbreak of suspected bird flu.

A roadside bombing today near a convoy of Canadian troops on the outskirts of the southern city of Kandahar seriously wounded at least one Afghan civilian.

British troops in the tense southern Iraqi city of Basra greatly reduced their presence in the streets today, apparently responding to a call from the provincial governor to sever co-operation until London apologised for storming a police station to free two British soldiers.

Hurricane Ophelia weakened slightly and slowed to a crawl today along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, giving the fragile barrier islands a prolonged soaking even as it appeared the storm had not caused severe inland flooding.

Hurricane Katrina probably killed thousands of people in New Orleans, the city’s mayor said today.

Army engineers trying to plug New Orleans’ breached levees struggled to move giant sandbags and concrete barriers into place, and the governor said today the situation was growing more desperate and there was no choice but to abandon the flooded city.

Hurricane Katrina ripped away part of the roof on the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans today as thousands of storm refugees huddled inside.

A huge rock loosened by rain and snow in Afghanistan tumbled onto an aid group’s vehicle, killing the Afghan driver and injuring three foreigners, officials said today, as freezing weather and disease left about 60 people dead throughout the country.

A US freight train carrying chlorine gas struck a parked train, killing eight people and injuring more than 240 others, nearly all of them sickened by a toxic cloud that persisted over this small textile town of Graniteville, South Carolina.