Washington  - The International Monetary Fund's executive board on Thursday approved emergency loans for Ukraine and Hungary, both of which have found themselves in severe financial jeopardy in amid a global credit crisis.

The IMF's 24-member board backed a 15.7-billion-dollar loan for Hungary and 16.4 billion dollars for Ukraine. Both are two-year deals, and each country will get access to about one fifth of the loans immediately.

Manila  - The Asian Development Bank said Friday that it approved a 1-million-dollar technical assistance grant to help boost the Philippine government's efforts to attain food security amid sharp surges in global food prices.

The Manila-based bank said the grant was to finance an analysis of the Philippines' agricultural and irrigation sectors.

Lahore, Nov 7: Alaska Governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who attracted much flak during the run up to the just concluded presidential election because of lack of foreign affairs experience, did not know that Africa was a continent, a Fox News correspondent has revealed.

Quoting unnamed McCain aides as saying, the correspondent who extensively covered the election, said that she could not name all three countries in the North American Free Trade Agreement (the US, Canada and Mexico) and declined to prepare for her now infamous Katie Couric interview.

Recently, the Israeli archeologists dug up the skeleton of a female spiritualist that seems to have been buried 12,000 years ago.

Leore Grosman, the archeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who led the excavation, reported, "The grave, which also held 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis and a human foot, is thought to be one of earliest burial sites of a shaman on archeological record and is the first of its kind found in the Middle East."