Sydney - A big fall on Wall Street saw Australian stocks droop Thursday.

The ASX 200 gave up 186 points, or 4.2 per cent, to close at 4,149 as investors took their lead from the US market rather than an upbeat assessment of the global economy by Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.

New Delhi, Nov 6: Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and the champion of global health issues such as AIDS, said he hopes that the US President-elect Barack Obama will be able to deliver on Washington''s healthcare commitments.

Gates, who is on a visit to New Delhi, was optimistic about Obama''s efforts to tackle global health issues, saying he has "shown a lot of interest" and would "drive improvements in those areas".

London, November 6 : Amy Winehouse’s hubby, Blake Fielder-Civil, who was sent to jail for thrashing a pub landlord and attempting to cover up his act, has been released.

Blake was allowed to let go from Edmunds Hill prison in Suffolk on November 5 after serving 12 months of a 27-month jail.

The 26-year-old, who had a chipped tooth and bore red marks on his arms as he left the prison, was relieved to have breathed free since his placement behind the bars in last November.

Nasik (Maharashtra), Nov 6 : An army officer has been arrested in connection with Malegaon and Modasa bomb blasts in September that killed five people.

Officers from the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) in Mumbai questioned Lieutenant-Colonel Srikant Prasad Purohit, for days before finally arresting him on Wednesday.

A local court in Maharashtra’s Nasik remanded Purohit to police custody till November 15 and also approved the conducting of narco analysis test on him.

Islamabad, Nov 6: US Central Command chief General David Petraeus, whose Pakistan visit ended yesterday, said that Pakistan was fighting its own war on terror because it faced an “existential threat from the situation in the Tribal Areas.”

Giving an account of his talks with Pakistani leadership, Petraeus said: “In general there is mutual agreement on the nature of the threat in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a threat that they increasingly see as a threat to Pakistan’s existence.”

Washington, Nov 6 : Pregnant women who have a smoking habit are more than twice as likely to have children with a cleft palate or lip birth defect, a new study has found.

The findings were based on the measurement of cotinine level, a metabolite of nicotine, in the blood from about 500 pregnant women.