New York - A UN General Assembly committee adopted Friday a draft arms trade treaty, the first step in efforts to control the sale of weapons around the world worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a British diplomat said.

The assembly's political committee, known as the First Committee, adopted 145-2 the draft treaty, which would go through more rounds of talks before a final vote by the 
192-nation assembly that would make it a binding treaty. The draft had been under negotiations for three years.

Nairobi/Goma - Desperate civilians who fled a relentless rebel offensive in east Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this week were beginning to return home Friday as a fragile ceasefire continued to hold, an aid agency said.

Rebel Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda on Wednesday evening called a ceasefire as his troops were on the verge of taking the major city of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

Tens of thousands of people, many of them from the town of Kibumba, north of Goma, fled the advance as the Congolese army went into full retreat.

San Francisco - Google and Yahoo are set to drop their proposed ad alliance possibly as early as next week because of antitrust objections by the Justice Department, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The report came a day after officials from the two companies met with regulators and appeared to be unwilling to make the compromises needed to satisfy Justice Department concerns that their combined power would overwhelm the online advertising market.

The deal was announced in June and proposed that Google start selling its search ads throughout Yahoo's US properties.

Istanbul - European countries like to view Turkey as a bridge between the West and the Orient.

But as the Islamic-conservative AKP government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan grows in self-confidence, it is looking beyond this, anxious to build its regional muscle alongside Iran to form a presence that the Arab and southern Caucasian states cannot ignore.

"Turkey is in the front row when it comes to Middle East issues," Foreign Minister Ali Babacan stressed at the World Economic Forum (WEF) regional meeting his country has been hosting.

Ankara - Turkey's Foreign Minister Ali Babacan on Friday expressed optimism that long-running disputes between Turkey and Armenia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan can be resolved and that Turkey was determined to push forward in the interests of regional peace.

"These two tracks could move fast because there is good political will," Babacan said at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Istanbul.

Berlin - Ultrasound checks have discovered a second axle in Germany's bullet-train fleet contains a tiny crack that some safety experts fear could have widened into a break and caused a rail disaster.

The Deutsche Bahn company, which has halted operations by dozens of ICE high-speed trains for checks, disclosed the discovery Friday after the company's chief executive, Hartmut Mehdorn, said an "anomaly" had been found.

The first such crack deeper than the safety limit of 2 millimetres was discovered in a drive axle in mid-October.