The Security Council's five permanent members agreed on Wednesday on a draft resolution that would ratchet up sanctions against North Korea by concentrating on its financial transactions and its arms industry, including allowing for inspections of its cargo vessels on the high seas.

Global military spending rose 4% in 2008 to a record $1,464bn (£914bn) - up 45% since 1999, according to the Stockholm-based peace institute Sipri.

In contrast with civilian aerospace and airlines, the defence industry remains healthy.

"The global financial crisis has yet to have an impact on major arms companies' revenues, profits and order backlogs," Sipri said.

Peace-keeping operations - which also benefit defence firms - rose 11%.
Missions were launched in trouble spots such as Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Australian Greens leader Bob Brown says he cannot afford to pay a $240,000 Forestry Tasmania bill, a move which could see him lose his seat in the Senate.

Senator Brown was ordered to pay the money after losing a federal court case to stop logging in the Wielangta Forest in south-east Tasmania.

He says he has been told he could end up bankrupt if he does not pay, meaning he would lose his Senate seat.

Senator Brown says he is now campaigning to raise the money which must be paid by the end of the month.

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro says US allegations that a Washington couple spied for Cuba are a "ridiculous tale".

In an editorial, he questioned the timing of their arrest - days after the Organisation of American States lifted Cuba's 1962 expulsion from the group.

The couple, retired state department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, are accused of having passed on information to Cuba for three decades.

The pair, both in their 70s, face up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.

In his article, Mr Castro described the case as an "espionage comic strip".

On April 13, the U.N. Security Council condemned North Korea's rocket launch earlier in the month.

Within nine hours, North Korea denounced and rejected the Security Council statement; expelled international inspectors and the U.S. technical team from its Yongbyon nuclear facilities; walked away from the Six-Party Talks and all previous agreements; threatened to strengthen its "self-defensive nuclear deterrent"; and said that it would restore its nuclear plant to normal operation and reprocess spent fuel rods.

Even as China's state media on Tuesday slammed the country's massive U.S. debt purchases, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said China's leaders believe in "the basic resilience and dynamism of the U.S. economy."

Geithner said the economic and finance officials he met with during his two-day trip did not repeat concerns they have expressed publicly over the past few months about the deteriorating value of their holdings of U.S. Treasuries or the U.S. dollar position as the world's dominant reserve currency.

If outlanders tend to associate Australia with kangaroos, broad-brim leather hats and an opera house, many Australians are different. They think of iron ore and bauxite, copper and coal, nickel, gold and uranium, a trove of mineral riches that is their nation's birthright and the bedrock of its prosperity.

Australia vetoed part of a $1.8 billion bid for Oz, a large zinc miner, because the military raised the prospect of Chinese espionage at an Oz mine not far from an aerospace test site.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday officially declared it would stop calling the new strain of flu "swine flu," because no Pigs in any country have been determined to have the illness and the origination of the strain has not been determined.

Australia's first television glass recycling plant is calling for New Zealanders' old televisions, as environmental organisations on both sides of the Tasman Sea try to stem the flow of toxic TVs to rubbish dumps.

Increasing numbers of people are dumping lead-containing cathode-ray tube televisions as they buy new flat-screen and digital televisions before the switch to digital broadcasting.

The change is due in 2013 in Australia and 2012-2015 in New Zealand.

Most discarded TV sets end up in landfill, with the toxins they contain such as lead, mercury and arsenic.

In a defining moment for American capitalism, President Barack Obama ushered General Motors Corp. into bankruptcy protection Monday and put the government behind the wheel of the company that once symbolized the nation's economic muscle.

The fallen giant, the largest U.S. industrial company ever to enter bankruptcy, is shedding some 21,000 jobs and 2,600 dealers. Sparing few communities, the retrenchment amounts to one-third of its U.S. work force and 40 percent of its dealerships.

Today's surprise rise in the country's growth figures has prompted a war of words in Federal Parliament over what exactly is responsible for the jump.

The increase in growth of 0.4 per cent for the March quarter means that Australia has avoided falling into a technical recession.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says the growth would not have happened without the Government's economic stimulus measures, including cash handouts and infrastructure spending.

With the stroke of a pen Tuesday, Obama created the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission, an 11-person panel that will plan and carry out activities to mark the 100th anniversary, in 2011, of the president's birth.

His widow, Nancy, watched as Obama signed the bill in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

Here, a man called Glenn Beck is 10 seconds into his daily talkshow, and already he's reached a rolling boil. "What are the mainstream media missing?" he wonders, bounding onstage like the Duracell Bunny. "I mean, besides EVERYTHING? You are not going to BELIEVE some of the crap that's going on in the world today!"

French President Nicolas Sarkozy opened his nation's first military base in the Gulf Tuesday, boosting the naval presence along strategic oil routes and in pirate-infested waters off the Somali coast.

The new naval base outside the United Arab Emirates' capital, Abu Dhabi, is France's first major foreign military installation since the 1960s and its first outside Africa. It is expected help safeguard vital Persian Gulf shipping lanes. It also puts France in position to play a higher profile role in calming the growing tensions between Iran and Gulf Arab states.