New York - The world's largest publicly traded oil company, Exxon Mobil, reported the largest quarterly profit in US history Thursday on the back of record oil prices.

Exxon earned 14.83 billion dollars in the quarter, an increase of 60 per cent on the same quarter of 2007.

Sales increased by 35 per cent to 137.74 billion dollars in the same period, the company reported from its headquarters in Houston in the US state of Texas, far exceeding analysts' forecasts.

Exxon Mobil held the previous quarterly profit record, with 11.7 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2008.

Tokyo - More than 1,000 Japanese signed an online petition to legalize marriage between humans and comic-book characters launched by a man who wants to marry a girl from a poplar Japanese manga comic series.

Taichi Takashita said he wanted to collect more than 1 million signatures to present to the government to legalize marriage to two-dimensional characters.

As soon as the law was passed, he plans to marry long-legged manga character Mikuru Asahina.

Baghdad - Twin blasts in Baghdad Thursday killed a civilian and wounded ten more, Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency reported.

In the first blast a carbomb exploded in a market place in northestern al-Hurria district. The explosion killed a civilian and wounded five, a police source said.

In the second blast, a bomb went off targeting a police patrol in al-Fadiliya district in the capital's east. The denotation injured five people including three policemen, a police source said.

Paris - David Nalbandian defeated compatriot Juan Del Potro for the second week in a row, earning a 6-4, 6-0 victory in the third round of the Paris Masters on Thursday.

Nalbandian's victory over his 20-year-old rival also mathematically delayed Del Potro's chance of formally clinching a place in the Masters Cup.

Del Potro has been nursing a painful split toenail for months, with no time to have it removed until after the Davis Cup final with Spain in late November.

He remains on provisional seventh in the race to the eight-man season-wrap event in Shanghai starting a week from Sunday.

Pamplona - Seventeen people were injured on Thursday in a car-bomb attack in the northern Spanish city of Pamplona, local authorities reported.

A vehicle exploded in a car park in the grounds of the University of Navarra in Pamplona, capital of the Navarra province which borders on the separatist Basque region.

Witnesses said several vehicles were set on fire by the explosion, and nearby buildings were substantially damaged.

Islamabad- The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Thursday it planned to provide food assistance to nearly 20,000 people left homeless by the deadly earthquake that struck Pakistan's north-western Balochistan province a day ago.

"We need to move fast, so we are going to start distributing food stocks from our warehouses in Quetta and Peshawar, so we can reach the people who need it most," said WFP Pakistan Country Director Wolfgang Herbinger, in a statement.

He added that the organization would be coordinating its response with the government and other UN agencies.