Los Angeles  - Tyson Chandler will no longer be soaring toward the basket to convert Chris Paul's flashy alley oop passes into ferocious dunks.

The New Orleans Hornets shipped Chandler to the Oklahoma City Thunder on Tuesday in exchange for veteran forwards Joe Smith, Chris Wilcox and the draft rights to DeVon Hardin.

The deal comes with the NBA trade deadline looming on Thursday.

Washington - US President Barack Obama has signed off on sending at least 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan and an announcement on the deployment could come later Tuesday, US television reported.

This would be the first deployment of a larger buildup expected to take place in Afghanistan this year to counter a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda that has brought about some of the worst violence in years.

San Francisco  - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger issued 20,000 layoff notices and halted work on the state's remaining 276 public projects as intransigent Republican lawmakers continued to stonewall efforts to pass a budget.

The budget impasse prompted legislative leader to hold parliamentarians in their chambers Tuesday until they reached an agreement.

Tehran  - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that Iran would not suspend its controversial nuclear enrichment programme for the sake of improving ties with the United States.

"We have already gone beyond the discussion of suspension (of uranium enrichment) and will decisively continue our (nuclear) path," Ahmadinejad said in an interview with state television network IRIB.

New York  - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday welcomed a decision by the United States to send a delegation to a Geneva conference on racism, which has been strongly criticized for its anti-Israel stance.

The Durban Review Conference, scheduled for 20-24 April in Geneva, continues from meetings that took place in Durban, South Africa, several years ago. That conference ended with condemnation of Israeli actions against the Palestinian people.

Preparatory discussions in Geneva on drafting an outcome document have also been denounced as anti-Israel.

New York  - The founder of a Muslim television station in the United States has been charged with murder after allegedly decapitating his wife, the channel's website and local media reported Tuesday.

Muzzammil Hassan, 44, was arrested Thursday after informing police that his wife's body was located at the Bridges TV office outside Buffalo in Orchard Park, New York. Police arrived to find Aasiya Zubair Hassan, 37, had been decapitated, the Buffalo News reported.