Brussels - The trouble with telling a nervous customer that you have solved their problem is that you first have to admit that there is one. That is the dilemma facing the world's banks, governments and financial institutions as they desperately try to restore faith in an economic system which millions of customers now believe has failed.

"We have shown the world that the United States of America will stabilize our financial markets and maintain a leading role in the global economy," US President George W Bush proclaimed on October 3 after the US Congress passed a 700-billion-dollar bank rescue plan.

His words spectacularly failed to restore global confidence, with stock markets nosediving in the days following the vote.

Washington, October : A team of Indian-origin researchers in Penn State''s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) says that small hospitals in rural areas can provide patients with the benefits of modern equipment and technology by sharing an IT infrastructure with larger hospitals in the same geographic area.

Assistant Professor Madhu Reddy, Associate Professor Sandeep Purao, and graduate student Mary Kelly conducted interviews with administrators at a regional hospital and three small, rural hospitals in central Pennsylvania.

The researchers said that the three smaller hospitals relied on the regional hospital to manage such things as software, laboratory information, and technical support.

Amsterdam - It's a beautiful Autumn day in Buitenveldert, one of Amsterdam's most popular neighbourhoods set against a backdrop of high-rises including the headquarters of Dutch ABN Amro and ING Bank.

Children bike around safely here on the broad bicycle paths, separated by trees from the roads.

During office hours, elderly people are strolling around in one of the many parks or chatting on benches at the upscale Gelderland plein shopping centre.

But despite appearances of such a peaceful urban setting, times have changed for Buitenveldert.

Cairo - Crowds of private investors in Egypt's stock market, rallying angrily outside the bourse in downtown Cairo, demanding a halt in trading or at least the resignation of the exchange's head, have become a common sight in recent weeks.

Egypt's capital market, which for five years has been one of the best performing in the world, is now in the doldrums. The benchmark CASE 30 index has fallen by more than half since last May.

As a result, Egypt's many small retail investors, who had bet their family's savings on the seemingly inexorable rise of the CASE, are increasingly caught by the financial, social and psychological fallout of the global credit crunch.

Ordinary Egyptian families are now feeling the pain, some in desperate ways.

Moscow - A Russian Soyuz space capsule Friday returned to Earth safely, carrying its crew of Russian cosmonauts and a US space tourist.

The capsule with Richard Garriott, a computer games designer and son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who paid 30 million dollars to follow in his father's footsteps, landed safely around 0330 GMT in the Kazakh steppe.

"Start and landing went according to plan. Now helicopters and search units are flying to the landing site," Valeri Lyndin a spokesman of the flight control near Moscow, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

The Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has wound up his Two day long Japan visit. 

Before flying to China he desribed his visit to the island nation as "very productive and fruitful".

This was his second visit to Japan in less than two years. "This in itself reflects the great importance that India attaches to its relationship with Japan," Dr. Singh said 

PM is scheduled to meet his Pakistani counterpart in Beijing.

In the concluding hours of his visit PM met with his Japanese counterpart Taro Aso on Wednesday.