US President Barack Obama will give his Nobel Peace Prize award money to 10 charities, including groups working on Haiti relief and supporting military families, the White House said Thursday. Four months after the US leader received the prestigious honor in Oslo, the White House said he would split the 1.

A key US senator said he would unveil new legislation on Monday aimed at giving American financial rules their biggest overhaul since the Great Depression in the wake of the 2008 meltdown. The move by banking committee chairman Christopher Dodd, a Democrat, ends weeks of talks with Republican Bob Corker aimed at producing a bipartisan bill.

US Senate Democrats Thursday heralded a bitter endgame of President Barack Obama's health reform drive, announcing they would use a contentious legislative tactic to try to pass the bill. Senate majority leader Harry Reid formally notified the Republican opposition that he would seek to pass the legislation by "reconciliation.

Nordic foreign ministers on Thursday urged the Myanmar junta to release the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and begin dialogue towards national reconciliation. In a joint statement, the Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish foreign ministers called for Suu Kyi to be allowed to participate in planned elections.

Nearly half the public schools in Kansas City, Missouri are slated for closure as the cash-strapped district struggles to address years of declining enrollment and poor performance. The predominantly African American school district has seen numbers cut in half over the past 10 years as parents moved their children out of the poverty-stricken inner city or into charter schools that operate independently.

President Barack Obama's trip next week to his childhood home of Indonesia will be no vacation and is unlikely to be delayed by his health reform drive, the White House said Thursday. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama, who is expected to leave the United States next Thursday, would attend a democracy promotion conference and highlight counter-terrorism measures during the visit to Indonesia.

Slovenian Prime Minister Borut Pahor said Thursday he hoped to succeed in getting the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo together to attend an EU-Balkans summit in Slovenia on March 20. He said the attempt to bring the two sides together was "to a certain extent a mission impossible". "But there are many that believe that if someone can do it, it is us.

Myanmar's detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi Thursday called on her people to respond to an "unjust" election law issued by the junta that bars her from the vote, her lawyer said. Under the laws enacted Monday, which have sparked international anger, Suu Kyi faces exclusion from her own National League for Democracy (NLD) and is prevented from standing in the elections expected in October or November.

The Swedish parliament adopted on Thursday, against the advice of the government, a resolution recognising massacres of Armenians during World War I as genocide. The resolution, which passed by one vote, "signifies that Sweden recognises the 1915 genocide of Armenians" and other ethnic groups during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

The general in charge of US military activities in Latin America said Thursday he had no evidence of links between Venezuela's leftist government and Colombian and Basque guerrilla groups. "We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection," General Douglas Fraser, head of the US Southern Command, told a Senate hearing.