Washington - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned on Tuesday that US financial sector losses could total 1.4 trillion dollars as the housing crisis at the centre of the turmoil has yet to reach its peak.

The IMF, in its annual financial stability report, warned that the rate of US mortgage defaults that sparked the financial crisis has yet to reach its peak, despite a year of homeowners already defaulting on their loans in record numbers.

Stockholm - US researcher Yoichiro Nambu and his Japanese colleagues Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa have won this year's Nobel Prize for Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Their discoveries were linked to describing the smallest building blocks in nature and nature's order, the academy said.

The academy cited Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics."

New York  - Banking rivals Citigroup and Wells Fargo have postponed for a day legal action over their tug-of-war for Wachovia, the United States' fourth-largest bank, it was disclosed Tuesday.

Citigroup on Monday filed a lawsuit against rival Wells Fargo & Co and Wachovia for 60 billion dollars in punitive and compensatory damages after a Wachovia announcement that it would go with a takeover offer of 15 billion dollars in a stock-for-stock exchange from Wells Fargo.

The Wells Fargo offer would override a Citigroup-government deal announced September 29, which offered 2.16 billion dollars for Wachovia.

Kabul- Afghan and US-led coalition forces killed 43 suspected Taliban militants in a clash in southern Afghanistan, the military said on Tuesday.

The combined forces were patrolling in Qalat district of the southern province of Zabul on Sunday when it took rebel fire from heavy weapons, assault rifles and snipers, the military said in a statement.

Washington, Oct 7 : Girls find it more difficult than boys to adjust to new surroundings, where they are required to learn a new language, according to new Michigan State University research.

The study, conducted on three- to six-year-old kids attending an international school in Beijing, found that generally girls faced more social adjustment problems than boys.

All the students, belonging to 16 nationalities, were dealing with both Chinese and English, which implied that each child was learning at least one new language.

Washington, Oct 7 : In a new study Michigan State University plant scientists have found a new gene, called bZIP28, that helps plants to beat the heat.

The discovery may help plant breeders to create new varieties of crops that flourish in warmer, drier climates.

Using Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family used as a model plant for genetic studies, the researchers found that the gene bZIP28 helps regulate heat stress response.

This is the first time bZIP28 has been shown to play a role heat tolerance.