New York - The five veto-wielding powers and Japan continued wrestling Monday over Japan's insistence on a sharpened UN resolution against North Korea for testing a ballistic missile over the weekend.

The UN ambassadors from the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain held their second negotiating session with Japan since Sunday, when a three-hour session of the full Security Council ended with no results.

New York  - An investment advisor who allegedly steered his clients' money to Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme was charged with fraud on Monday.

J Ezra Merkin invested more than 2.4 billion dollars of his clients' money with Madoff, who pleaded guilty last month to the 50- billion-dollar scheme in which funds from new investors were used to pay off earlier ones.

New York - IBM's takeover bid for Sun Microsystems collapsed over the weekend on disagreements over price and conditions of the deal, Bloomberg financial news agency reported Monday.

After Sun's board broke off the talks, IBM withdrew its offer, according to an unnamed person close to the deal cited by Bloomberg.

Sun balked not only over the price, but also over the absence of guarantees that the deal would go forward even if there were delays such as an antitrust review, the source said.

New York  - Ford Motor Company said Monday it had trimmed its debts by 38 per cent in a massive effort to keep the car maker from seeking government aid to survive.

Ford, the only US carmaker not to have received government funds, has reduced its debt by 9.9 billion dollars through agreements with creditors. It offered last month to pay creditors discounted amounts using 2.4 billion dollars in cash and 468 million shares of stock.

The debt reduction will save Ford 500 million dollars in interest each year, the company said.

New York, Apr 5 : Binghamton Police has called the gunman who shot 13 people dead at an immigration center a "coward" who planned to fight police, but later changed his mind and committed suicide.

Police Chief Joseph Zikuski identified the shooter as 41-year-old Jiverly Wong, and said he had voluntarily changed his last name to Voong.

"He arrived wearing body armor. At one point in his thinking process, he was going to take on police or at least stop them from stopping him. He must have been a coward. We speculate that when he heard the sirens, he decided to take his own life," the police chief told reporters.

New York, Apr 5 : Beatles biographer Geoffrey Giuliano is miffed with John Lennon's half sister because she used material from a 1986 book they co-wrote without giving him credit or money.

Giuliano is upset with Lennon''s half-sister, Julia Baird as she used vast material from their book "John Lennon, My Brother" - which he co-wrote with her - for another memoir without giving him any credit.

"There''s only one reason she did it, and that''s to screw me out of my share," The New York Post quoted Giuliano as saying.