Buenos Aires  - In a move to confront the growing threat of recession, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner Tuesday announced a 21.5-billion-dollar (71-billion-peso) programme to create jobs in the construction industry.

The aim is to expand the number of jobs in the sector from 362,000 to 770,000, Kirchner said at the annual meeting of the building industry in Buenos Aires.

Details of the programme are to be unveiled on December 15.

Bucharest  - Romania is facing a protracted tug-of-war over the formation of a new government, with parliamentary elections scheduled for November 30. The global financial crisis, which is already costing jobs in the new EU member state, is likely to play a role.

Opinion polls show insufficient support for any one party to rule

alone. The only apparent certainty is that Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu, leader of the National Liberal Party (PNL) will be voted out of office. His party can expect to come third at best.

Washington - A report by the nation's leading cancer organizations released Tuesday showed the first decline in 10 years in the incidence of new cases of cancer for both men and women.

The report was compiled by the National Cancer Institute of the government-funded US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and released online.

The decline was driven largely by declines in some of the most common types of cancer, according to the report. The death rate from cancer has been in steady decline over the past years.

The annual report on the status of cancer has been issued since 1998.

Geneva - The International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned Tuesday that millions of workers worldwide would likely see an erosion of their wages in 2009 due to the global financial crisis.

In industrialized countries, wages would likely decline by 0.5 per cent. That compares to growth of 0.8 per cent in 2008.

Adding to the bad news, the ILO reported that wages fall at a faster rate than gross domestic product (GDP) contraction in bad economic years, but grow at a slower rate than GDP in good years. Indeed, for every 1 percentage point of GDP growth, salaries only increased by 0.75 percentage point.

New York - US markets got a slight boost from government plans announced Tuesday to pump an additional 800 billion dollars into the struggling economy and unfreeze credit for consumers and small businesses.

The increases continued a three-day rally on Wall Street. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 36.06 points, or 0.4 per cent, to 8,479.47. The broad-based Standard & Poor's 500 Index gained 5.58, or 0.7 per cent, to 857.39, while the technology heavy Nasdaq Composite Index slipped 7.29 points, or 0.5 per cent, to 1,464.73.

Hamburg - Both Arsenal and Real Madrid needed 1-0 wins to book their places in the last 16 of the Champions League Tuesday while a draw was sufficient for Manchester United to ensure their berth in the knockout stages.

Arsenal put a torrid week which saw William Gallas stripped of the captaincy and Arsene Wenger's side crash 3-0 at Manchester City behind them, registering a solid performance to beat Dynamo Kiev 1-0 thanks to a late Nicklas Bendner score.

Kiev finished the game with 10 men after Olexandr Aliyev received a straight red card for trying to move the referee away from the ball as he wanted to take a free-kick quickly.