Washington  - Hoping to avoid bankruptcy, ailing US carmaker Chrysler LLC on Friday will shut down all of its manufacturing plants for at least one month because of plummeting car sales, the company announced Wednesday.

Chrysler's announcement comes after US lawmakers last week failed to agree on a 14-billion-dollar emergency loan for the US car industry. Chrysler and General Motors Corp have said they do not expect to survive without federal aid.

Riga - While politicians in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania concentrate on tackling the economic crisis with austerity plans, lending restrictions and even IMF loans, they may be neglecting another threat to their economic well-being which could eventually be just as damaging.

Figures released this week by the European Union's statistics office, Eurostat, showed populations in the Baltics are shrinking fast, with many more Balts dying each year than are being born.

While Estonia recorded the fourth-largest birth rate in the EU, with 12.2 births per 1,000 inhabitants, it is still losing people faster than it can replace them, with a death rate at 12.8 per thousand.

Washington  - More than a dozen US embassies in Europe have received mail containing a white powder, but tests of the substance have been negative, the US State Department said Wednesday.

Deputy spokesman Robert Wood confirmed that 16 embassies have received the powder, which was examined for a variety of hazardous substances. The envelopes were postmarked in the state of Texas.

Washington, Dec 18 : An instrument aboard Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO's) Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has inaugurated 3-D imaging of the moon, revealing new information about the lunar surface.

Known as the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, NASA's guest instrument aboard Chandrayaan-1 has taken a new composite image, which provides new information about the Orientale Basin region of the moon.

The Orientale Basin is located on the moon's western limb.

The data for this composite were captured by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper during the commissioning phase of Chandrayaan-1 as the spacecraft orbited the moon at an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles).

Washington  - A store in the United States has defended a decision rejecting a request from a father to inscribe his son's name, Adolf Hitler, on a birthday cake.

The ShopRite store in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, said it reserves the right to refuse to provide inappropriate services, Karen Meleta, the spokeswoman for the chain of stores, said Tuesday.

"We have a sensibility about what we believe is appropriate and what we believe is inappropriate," Meletta told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa. "We have standards and principles by which we decorate and we were exercising them."

Wellington  - Five earthquakes rattled New Zealand Thursday morning, according to seismologists of GNS Science who recorded them. There were no reports of damage from any of the quakes.

Three hit the North Island, including one measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale, off the Bay of Plenty coast and 80 kilometres north- east of White Island, which has an active volcano.

That quake was deep, at 130 kilometres below the surface, and GNS Science said it was likely to be felt in the Bay of Plenty, Gisborne and Hawek's Bay regions.