Madrid - Madrid's Prado art museum drew a record number of visitors in 2008 despite the economic crisis, sources of Spain's top art museum said Friday.

New York - The gloomy financial picture has prompted New York City to put 700 vehicles in its car fleet up for sale by the end of March, the New York Times reported Friday.

Beirut  - Thousands of protesters from various Palestinian and Lebanese groups demonstrated Friday in front the Egyptian Embassy in the capital Beirut to protest what they described as "the Arab stand" towards the Gaza attack.

"Where are the Arabs? What is this silence?", read one of the placards carried by the protesters.

The crowd carried coffins wrapped in black and Palestinian flags while they moved through the streets from the United Nations headquarters towards the Egyptian embassy.

The demonstrators staged a sit-in in front of the UN headquarters in downtown Beirut.

Baghdad - A suicide bomber blew himself up at a national reconciliation conference in Iraq Friday, killing at least 23 people and wounding another 42 south of Baghdad, security sources said.

The bomber was a wanted man, identified as Mohamed al-Karghuli. He smuggled himself into a national reconciliation conference in a sheikh's house in al-Yussifiyah, General Qassem Attah told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.

In Hillah, unknown gunmen killed two tribal policemen and injured another four in an attack on a check point, the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency reported.

Tribal police also known as Awakening Councils are composed of Sunni tribe members collaborating with US forces to fight al-Qaeda terrorist network in Iraq.

Madrid - Spanish car sales went down 28.1 per cent in 2008 in t

Kiev  - Ukraine's government on Friday upped the ante in its natural gas conflict with Russia, informing the Kremlin's ongoing gas shipments to Europe might well be "confiscated."

The absence of a contract between Russia and Ukraine for gas deliveries and transfers onward to Europe makes any gas shipped by Russia into Ukraine technically "of unknown origin," and so subject to confiscation by the Ukrainian government, wrote Oleh Dubina, chairman of Ukraine's Naftogaz Ukrainy gas trading company.