Madrid - Spain's Queen Sofia opposes gay marriage and doesn't
understand the need for gay pride parades, according to a report in the
daily El Pais about a newly published biography on the queen.

According to the report, the queen is not opposed, in principle, to
homosexuals living together or forming unions. "But you can't
characterize this as marriage," she told the newspaper.

She proposed alternate names - civil union, for example - for such pairings.

She also questioned the need for gay pride parades.

"I can understand, expect and respect that there are people with

Vilnius- Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus played host to US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff Thursday in Vilnius, and was told Lithuanians will be able to travel to the US from November 17 without a visa.

Chertoff has spent the last few days touring the region delivering similar official confirmation to other states including Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

New York - The world's largest publicly traded oil company, Exxon Mobil, reported the largest quarterly profit in US history Thursday on the back of record oil prices.

Exxon earned 14.83 billion dollars in the quarter, an increase of 60 per cent on the same quarter of 2007.

Sales increased by 35 per cent to 137.74 billion dollars in the same period, the company reported from its headquarters in Houston in the US state of Texas, far exceeding analysts' forecasts.

Exxon Mobil held the previous quarterly profit record, with 11.7 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2008.

Tokyo - More than 1,000 Japanese signed an online petition to legalize marriage between humans and comic-book characters launched by a man who wants to marry a girl from a poplar Japanese manga comic series.

Taichi Takashita said he wanted to collect more than 1 million signatures to present to the government to legalize marriage to two-dimensional characters.

As soon as the law was passed, he plans to marry long-legged manga character Mikuru Asahina.