Washington  - President-elect Barack Obama announced a national security team on Monday that will be tasked with mapping out a new direction for foreign policy and reshape the way the United States approaches the world.

The new team will focus on ending the conflict in Iraq and will inherit an escalating conflict in Afghanistan, where the outcome remains in doubt. They will also have to plot a strategy to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and deal with a resurgent Russia.

Washington  - She was Barack Obama's chief challenger in the dramatic two-year neck-and-neck race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Over and over again, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 61, charged that then-senator Obama, 47, lacked political experience. But in the end, Clinton conceded defeat, opening the way for the first African- American president.

Prague  - Czech parliament's lower house is due to start debating the European Union's reform treaty on December 9, an official said Monday.

Lower house speaker Miloslav Vlcek called an extraordinary session on the Lisbon Treaty at the request of the opposition Social Democratic Party, which backs the charter.

The Czech Republic, which assumes the EU presidency on January 1, is the last member state to vote on the accord, which has been stalled since Irish voters rejected it in a June referendum.

Harare/Johannesburg  - Rioting broke out in central Harare late Monday as mobs of uniformed but unarmed soldiers followed by hundreds of civilians went on the rampage, eyewitnesses said.

Several shots were fired as authorities deployed a large force of heavily armed troops and riot police, and one man was reported shot. It was not known whether the shooting was fatal.

Panic ensued as vehicles were stoned, shop windows smashed and looted as the mobs - some of them waving the open hand salute of the country's pro-democracy Movement for Democratic Change - whistled and danced through the city centre.

The force of anti-riot police was swiftly deployed and the mobs dispersed, leaving bricks and stones littering the road.

Washington  - President-elect Barack Obama on Monday nominated Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and announced he would keep Defence Secretary Robert Gates in his current job in widely expected moves to set up his national security team.

Clinton, 61, his former rival, will leave her job as the senator from New York if confirmed to become the nation's next top diplomat. The reappointment of Gates, 65, is designed to ensure a smooth transition takes place as the United States fights two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gates became the head of the Pentagon under President George W Bush in December 2006. Obama also named former Marine General James Jones to serve as national security advisor.

Stuttgart  - German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday rejected immediate tax cuts to stimulate the economy, telling her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she preferred to invest in Germany's infrastructure.

The CDU re-elected Merkel party leader. She was the only candidate and is to lead the CDU in a general election next September.

She was addressing a two-day national party conference in the southern city of Stuttgart amid deep divisions over how Germany should come to grips with the worst financial upheaval in decades.