London - A Russian oligarch who was assigned as an agent to the former Soviet embassy in Britain is set to buy a controlling stake in the London Evening Standard newspaper, the Guardian reported Thursday.

Alexander Lebedev is to buy 76 per cent of the tabloid, London's only evening paper, following secret negotiations with Lord Rothermere, the newspaper baron and chairman of the Daily Mail & General Trust.

Islamabad - Pakistani police on Thursday arrested at least 10 terror suspects in the southern port city of Karachi after a gunfight that left two officers dead and 11 others wounded, media reports said.

The arrests were made in a pre-dawn raid on a house in the city's congested Sohrab Goth neighbourhood, the Geo news channel quoted Karachi police chief Waseem Ahmed as saying.

Manila  - Nine suspected terrorists were arrested in the southern Philippines in separate operations earlier in the week, a military report said Thursday.

The suspects, believed to be members of the Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist group, were arrested Monday and Tuesday just outside Cotabato City,
930 kilometres south of Manila.

The report did not give details about the identities of the suspects, who were undergoing tactical interrogation in a military camp in Cotabato.

Kuala Lumpur  - Dog owners in a central Malaysian district must now obtain a written permission from their neighbours in order to keep their pets, a newspaper report said Thursday.

The ruling by the city council in the central state of Negeri Sembilan was aimed at ensuring that pet dogs were not a nuisance to neighbours, said council president Abdul Halim Abdul Latif.

"The pets cannot be allowed to roam freely outside their compound," he was quoted as saying by the Star daily.

Tokyo - A shell, possibly left from World War II, exploded early Wednesday on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, inflicting serious injury to a construction worker, media reports said.

Police were quoted as saying Jun Kohagura suffered injuries on his face when the shell, believed to have been a dud fired or dropped from an aircraft during the war, exploded. A 75-year-old man laying bed at a nearby senior home also suffered minor injury to his heels from windows that broke as a result of the blast.

London, January 14: The classic British bulldog is to lose its Churchillian jowl because of a change in breeding standards effected by the Kennel Club.

The shake-up means that the dog will have a shrunken face, a sunken nose, longer legs, and a leaner body.

The British Bulldog Breed Council is unhappy with the change, and is considering taking legal action against the club.

"What you'll get is a completely different dog, not a British bulldog," Time Online quoted Robin Searle, the chairman, as saying.

New breeding standards for 209 dog species have been brought into immediate force, according to the online report.