Berlin - German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US president-elect Barack Obama agreed in a telephone call to work together to help solve global challenges, a Berlin government spokesman said Friday.

The stabilization of Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, climate change and Iran's controversial nuclear programme require closer cooperation, the spokesman said in a statement following Thursday evening's telephone call.

Merkel also congratulated Obama on his "historic" election victory, the statement said.

Washington, Nov 7 : Children born to mothers with pregnancy-related diabetes are twice as likely to have language development problems, says a new study.

The research team from Universite Laval''s School of Psychology suggests that gestational diabetes can adversely affect brain development of babies leading to language delay in children.

Tokyo - Asia-Pacific stocks ended the week mixed as Wall Street's overnight plunge prompted investors to sell but interest-rate cuts in some markets led to afternoon recoveries.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average plunged 3.55 per cent on Toyota Motor Corp's sharp cut in its earnings forecast for this fiscal year, but South Korean and Hong stocks took big jumps on the rate cuts.

The Nikkei was the region's big loser as it shed 316.14 points to close at 8,583 but still managed to end the week up 0.07 per cent.

Washington, Nov 7: Hannah Montana actress Miley Cyrus used to clean toilets before becoming famous.

Cyrus, who made 18.2 million dollars last year, revealed on the Tyra Banks Show that she was eleven when she worked as a cleaner at a place called ‘Sparkles’ and cleaned houses.

"I had one normal job and I actually liked it," US magazine quoted Miley, as saying.

"I worked at this place called Sparkles Cleaning Service and I cleaned houses. I was, like, 11 ... I can scrub a toilet,” she added.

Washington, Nov 7: A new study has suggested that the distribution of sunlight, rather than the size of North American ice sheets, is the key variable in changes in the North Atlantic deep-water formation during the last four glacial cycles.

The study, by Lorraine Lisiecki, assistant professor in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her team, goes back 425,000 years.

London, Nov 7 : Anjem Choudary, a hate preacher, has created a furore in the UK after he urged British Muslims not to wear poppies.

Choudary, 41, is the right-hand man of exiled cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed.

He said that any Muslim wearing poppy, the symbol of respect in the UK, was betraying his religion and backing “British nationalism”.

Choudary’s statement came after news broke that poppy sales were down in Muslim dominated areas of the country.