Sydney - Kevin Rudd needed something to give his poll ratings pep and it came in the ghastly form of a stock market meltdown that wilted the pension plans of millions of Australians.

Now, the approval ratings of the 50-year-old former diplomat, a year into his first spell as prime minister, suggest he could walk on water.

"It puts him into the 70-per-cent range and only one other prime minister has done that," said pollster John Stirton, noting that only Bob Hawke, 36 years ago, was a more popular prime minister.

People tend to rally round their leader in a crisis. It's happened to Britain's Gordon Brown. For Rudd, as for Brown, the acclamation is particularly pleasing.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service has announced that it has recalled 2,758 pounds of ground beef from Vermont Livestock, Slaughter and Processing Co., LLC, a Ferrisburg, Vt., firm, because it may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.

The 'Rock On’ team is again in the limelight for different reasons. A large scale concert has been organized by Arjun Rampal and Farhan Akhtar who starred together in the latest hit film 'Rock On’.

In a very peaceful settlement between the star singer Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie, the custody of the children was given to Madonna.

The Pop Diva's Daughter Lourdes (12) from a previous relationship with a fitness trainer, the couple's eight year old biological son Rocco and their adopted son David will stay with their mother but Ritchie will have 'Broad Access' to  his children Rocco and David.

Washington - Insurance giant American International Group Inc, bailed out of a cash-flow crisis last month by a loan that temporarily made the US government its majority shareholder, said Monday that it would stop lobbying in Washington.

A spokesman said that the company's Washington office would continue to monitor federal lawmaking to assess impacts on AIG, but that routine work to influence congressional legislation would stop.

In addition, the company has cancelled more than 150 posh corporate events, saving an estimated 80 million dollars. AIG management came under fierce criticism from lawmakers after the revelation that executives spend 440,000 dollars on a retreat at a luxury spa, just days after the federal loan that kept the company afloat.

Washington, October 21: Johns Hopkins scientists have found that sugar plays a significant role in how cells work, paving the way for new therapies for a number of diseases like diabetes, neurodegeneration, and cancer.

The researchers say that sugar may be as influential as phosphate in putting the proteins in cells on and off.

The conventional wisdom was that the job of turning proteins on and off fell to phosphates, which did so by fastening to and unfastening from proteins, a process called phosphorylation.

The latest research paper by the Johns Hopkins team suggests that sugar also plays a role in regulating phosphorylation itself.