Stockholm - The Swedish government and banks unveiled plans Monday to cooperate in freezing payments to criminal organizations engaged in child pornography.

"If we can prevent the payments, we strike directly at the criminal activities of the gangs," Financial Markets Minister Mats Odell and Fredrik Sauter, chief executive of online bank Skandiabanken, said in a joint op-ed article in the daily Dagens Nyheter.

The sale of child porn is believed to be extremely lucrative, but it is hard to trace payments.

New Delhi - Businesses and schools shut down Monday in India's north-eastern state of Assam as part of a strike called to protest serial bombings there last week, which left 81 people dead and more than 300 injured, news reports said.

The 11-hour dawn-to-dusk strike was called by the influential All Assam Students' Union, which has accused the government of failing to fight terrorism.

London, Nov 3 : Inspiring author Francesca Amber Sawyer has revealed how she witnessed English comedian Russell Brand turn from a charming man into a nasty person when he learnt that the Sachs scandal had been made public.

Brand, 33, had been trying to charm Sawyer into another threesome, but his whole demeanour changed after he received a call about the scandal and the trouble he was in.

“He’d been sweet and charming,” News of the World quoted her as saying.

London, Nov 3 : Almost all human genes, about 94 percent, generate more than one form of their protein products by skipping or including certain sequences from the messenger RNA, say MIT scientists.

The phenomenon, called alternative splicing, is much more prevalent and varies more between tissues than was previously believed.

Ten years ago, the scientists thought that the phenomenon was limited to only a few genes, but the figure reached to 50-plus percent more recently.

Dublin - The man who spearheaded Irish opposition to the European Union's Lisbon Treaty said Monday that he hoped to turn his organization into a European political party.

Declan Ganley told Irish broadcaster RTE his aim was to run candidates in many EU states in the June 2009 European elections.

He said the move would provide an opportunity across the EU to provide a proxy referendum on the treaty designed to streamline the running of the 27-nation bloc.

London, Nov. 3: A Muslim chef is suing police chiefs after being asked to cook pork sausages and bacon for officers’ breakfasts.