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Madrid - The militant Basque separatist group ETA planned to kill Spanish "super-judge" Baltasar Garzon by sending him a bottle of poisoned brandy, the daily El Pais reported Tuesday.

The alleged plan was included in documents seized from ETA's military leader Jurdan Martitegi after his capture in France in April.

Washington, June 9 : An international team of astronomers has found most dark gamma-ray bursts occur in normal galaxies detectable by large, ground-based optical telescopes.

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe''s biggest explosions, capable of producing so much light that ground-based telescopes easily detect it billions of light-years away.

Yet, for more than a decade, astronomers have puzzled over the nature of so-called dark bursts, which produce gamma rays and X-rays but little or no visible light.

Turin, Italy - Fiat has no intention to pull out of its takeover bid for struggling US automotive giant Chrysler, despite a US Supreme Court decision to postpone the deal, a spokesman for the Italian carmaker said Tuesday.

The spokesman was commenting on news reports quoting Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne that he would "never" abandon the Chrysler bid even if a June 15 deadline for the deal to go through were to expire.

Dusseldorf - One of four Islamists on trial in Germany for plotting to car-bomb US military bases told the court Tuesday he would confess so as to save time in the long-running case.

Adem Yilmaz, who is a Turkish national raised in Germany, told the court, "I couldn't care less how long you give me, whether it's 20 or 30 years. I just want to get what we're doing here over and done with. It's boring."

He requested a meeting with his fellow accused, without their court-appointed defence lawyers present. The judge immediately agreed, and federal prosecutors said they had no objection.

Tehran - Renowned activist Jamileh Kadivar would become the first ever female minister in Islamic Iran if moderate candidate Mehdi Karroubi were elected president, Karroubi said Tuesday.

Karroubi and Mir-Hossein Moussavi are the two moderate candidates challenging incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Friday's election.

Kadiver, a university professor and former parliament deputy, "is one of the most qualified officials of the country and could take care of either the culture or higher education ministry," Karroubi told reporters in Tehran.

New York, June 9 : Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is of the opinion that the economic policies being pursued by the Obama administration will convert the United States into a socialist nation.

"When you consider that the federal government is about 11 trillion dollars in debt, and we''re borrowing more to spend more ... it defies any sensible economic policy any of us ever learned through college," the former Republican vice presidential candidate told Fox News in an interview.