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Washington, Jun 19 : Veteran actor Kirk Douglas recently won a campaign to get an official apology for slavery from America's politicians.

Douglas, 92, who has played a slave in his most famous film Spartacus, had launched the campaign years ago, and on June 18, the Senate agreed to the apology.

"In my last book, `Let's Face It', I wrote about the importance of our country showing the world that we are capable of humility by making an apology for our behaviour towards African-Americans before and after the Civil War," Contactmusic quoted him as having written on his MySpace. com website this April.

New Delhi, June 19 : Former Uttarakhand Chief Minister and senior BJP leader Bhagat Singh Koshiyari on Friday withdrew his resignation from Rajya Sabha in keeping with the directive of the party''s central leadership.

Koshiyari had sent his resignation letter to Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari on Wednesday, apparently to build pressure for removal of Chief Minister B C Khanduri.

Washington, June 19 : Queen's University researchers in Canada have developed a new approach to tracking polar bears, which will shed more light on the potentially endangered Arctic animal and help boost the economy of Canada's north.

Integrating the traditional knowledge of Inuit hunters with state-of-the-art genetic DNA analysis, a three-part method developed by biologists Peter V. C. de Groot and Peter Boag, is cheaper and much easier on the bears than the current tracking practice, in which they are spotted from helicopters, tranquilized and marked.

Tokyo  - Sony Corp is seeing "progress," and it would turn to profit for the current fiscal year after the Japanese electronics giant suffered the first annual net loss in 14 years the previous fiscal year, Sony's Howard Stringer said Friday.

The company's chief executive officer and chairman Stringer assured investors at a shareholders' meeting in Tokyo Friday that Sony would come back from the doldrums of slow television sales and yen's surge.

Brussels - European Union leaders were set to call for a rapid implementation of United Nations sanctions on North Korea on Friday following its nuclear and missile tests, according to a statement prepared for a summit in Brussels.

The heads of the 27 EU member states "insist on a swift and efficient implementation of all the measures" agreed by the UN to punish Pyongyang for its nuclear test, the statement, drawn up for approval by national leaders, said.

Zagreb  - Chinese presid