New York - US banking giant Citigroup said Monday in New York that it was cutting some 50,000 jobs from its international workforce after suffering massive losses as a result of the global financial crisis.

The bank was planning to cut costs by 20 per cent, it said Monday.

Warsaw - Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was going to Kuwait and Qatar Monday for three days of talks on gas contracts and lessening Poland's reliance on Russian supplies.

Tusk would meet with Gulf leaders for talks on economic cooperation, energy, and the chemical and petrochemical industry, his chancellery said.

Taipei- Taiwan's former vice president Lien Chan Monday headed to Peru for the November 22 leaders' summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, becoming the highest-ranking envoy from the island to attend the annual event.

Leading a 13-member delegation of foreign and economic affairs experts and officials, Lien was to stop at New York for three days before flying to Lima on November 20.

Jerusalem - Israel plans to release some 250 Palestinian militants from Israeli pr

Bonn, Germany - Greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries have continued to rise despite goals set by the Kyoto agreement to curb carbon pollution, a UN body said Monday.

The UN Climate Change Secretariat said planet-warming gases released by the 40 industrial states that signed up the Kyoto framework had increased an average 2.3 per cent between 2000-2006.

Islamabad - A doctor was arrested in Pakistan's eastern province of Punjab after he failed to kill himself in his beloved's grave, police said Monday.

Irfan Sheikh, who age was estimated at 50, was found unconscious in the dug-up grave of his female cousin who died two days earlier in Kamalia, 130 kilometers south-west of Lahore, the provincial capital of Punjab.