London - Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, who was Wednesday given an academic briefing on the origins of the credit crunch, wound up the "lesson" with the searching question of why nobody had seen the crisis coming.

The 82-year-old monarch had the complexities of the current global financial crisis explained to her during the inauguration of a new building at the renowned London School of Economics (LSE).

Stockholm  - Swedish state-owned energy group Vattenfall on Wednesday said it is buying an 18.7-per-cent stake in Polish energy company ENEA S. A. for 4.5 billion kronor (584 million dollars).

ENEA is one of four state-owned energy groups in Poland and accounts for some 8 per cent of the country's energy production, the Vattenfall statement said.

Vattenfall chief executive Lars G Josefsson noted that ENEA's energy production is mainly coal-based. He said this would present an opportunity for Vattenfall to gain from the group's knowledge of CCS, or carbon capture and storage, technology.

Lisbon - Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates on Wednesday described US

Nairobi  - A regional summit on the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo is to take place in Nairobi Friday, a Kenyan foreign ministry official said Wednesday as small-scale fighting between rebels and pro-government militia continued for a second day.

"There will be a summit on Friday," Patrick Wamoto, Head of the Kenyan Foreign Ministry's African and African Union Directorate, told Deutsche Presse Agentur dpa. "The agenda is DR Congo."

Amman - The Islamic Action Front (IAF), Jordan's largest political party, on Wednesday expressed guarded optimism over the election of Barak Obama as the next US president and said they considered his win an "apology" from the American people to the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We welcome Obama's election and believe that his win represents a clear message inside as well as outside America," IAF Secretary General Zaki Bani Ershaid told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Moscow- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called for the extension the presidential term from four to six years in his first state-of-the-nation address since succeeding Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.

Medvedev, 43, addressing the country's top political elite, gathered in the Kremlin's opulent St George Hall, said the change would allow the government to carry through more effectively with its reforms.