Washington- US President George W Bush on Saturday urged Congress to approve a long standing free trade agreement with Colombia, warning a failure to do so could encourage populist Latin American leaders pursuing anti-US policies.

"If this agreement were not to pass it would embolden voices of populism in the neighbourhood to the detriment of a government that has been very strong," Bush said at a White House meeting with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a close US ally in South America.

Washington- The administration of President George W Bush is seeking 700 billion dollars from Congress to buy up distressed assets as part of its plan to help halt the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The newspaper's online service said the Treasury Department sent Congress legislative language Friday evening, asking for broad authority to buy assets from US financial institutions.

The two-and-a-half-page request contains a broad outline of how this new entity would function, the report said.

Kathmandu - Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Saturday
left for New York to take part in the United Nations General Assembly.

The visit is his third foreign trip since he became the prime minister just over a month ago.

Dahal, a former rebel leader popularly known as Prachanda, will
address the UN General Assembly on Friday and is expected to attend the
banquet host by US President George W Bush in New York.

Speaking briefly to reporters, Dahal said he would put Nepal's views during his speech at the UN.

Washington, Sept 20 : Bats, known for their sharp-hearing, can easily pick up rustling sounds produced by its prey, even against the background noise of a highway, according to a new study.

In their study, Bjorn Siemers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, and colleagues monitored foraging bats'' responses to rustling mealworms in noisy environments and

While working with a group of young male greater mouse-eared bats, the researchers allowed individual bats to forage freely in a large soundproof room.

Washington, September 20 : A new mathematical model has shown how plant agriculture actually began much earlier than first thought, pushing back crop development by 10,000 years.

A team led by Dr Robin Allaby from the University of Warwick in the UK developed the model.

Until recently, researchers believed the story of the origin of agriculture was one of a relatively sudden appearance of plant cultivation in the Near East around 10,000 years ago spreading quickly into Europe and dovetailing conveniently with ideas about how quickly language and population genes spread from the Near East to Europe.

Washington, September 20 : An international team of astrophysicists has found and “weighed” the most massive star to date, which has a mass 116 times greater than that of the Sun.

The team was led by Universite de Montreal researchers from the Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Quebec (CRAQ).

They successfully “weighed” a star of a binary system with a mass 116 times greater than that of the Sun, waltzing with a companion of 89 solar masses, doubly beating the previous record and breaking the symbolic barrier of 100 solar masses for the first time.

Located in the massive star cluster NGC 3603, the supermassive star system, known under the name of A1, has a rotation period of 3.77 days.