Two US missile strikes on Wednesday killed at least 12 militants in Pakistan's tribal region near the Afghan border, officials said. The first strike took place at 8:00 pm (1500 GMT) in Mizar Madakhel village, some 50 kilometres (31 miles) west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan and was followed by a second strike.

Wall Street stocks traded mixed Wednesday after government data showed a drop in wholesale inventories and rising sales. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 9. 44 points (0. 09 percent) to 10,554. 94 at 1725 GMT after posting modest gains a day earlier on the one-year anniversary of the start of the market's rebound from its lows last year.

A top Google executive reaffirmed Wednesday that the Internet giant is prepared to leave China if Beijing says it must censor Web searches or quit the country. "Google is firm in its decision that it will stop censoring our search results for China," Google vice president and deputy general counsel Nicole Wong told a key US House of Representatives Committee.

US President Barack Obama said on Wednesday that the situation in Haiti following January's earthquake was still "dire" and warned that a second humanitarian disaster was possible. After talks with Haitian President Rene Preval at the White House, Obama said that the looming spring rains in Haiti could pose a severe threat to 1.

The biggest challenge to Cable News Network is not other 24-hour television news stations but social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the president of CNN US said Wednesday. "The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites," Jon Klein said at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2010 Media Summit here.

All schools across the busy midwestern US city of Minneapolis were put on lockdown early Wednesday after a vague threat was posted on two social networking sites, a spokeswoman said. The lockdown, which affected around 50 schools in the Minneapolis public school district, meant children were told to remain in their classrooms while access to outside visitors was strictly limited.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called Wednesday on President Barack Obama to put his weight behind a quick resolution to a US-Brazilian trade dispute. Brasilia on Monday announced it would raise tariffs on imported American cosmetics, appliances and cars worth 591 million dollars to counter what the World Trade Organization ruled were unfair US cotton subsidies.

The UN's independent expert on torture on Wednesday criticised the Obama administration for not investigating allegations of torture made when president George W. Bush was in power. "This is my criticism of the Obama administration: There is not enough done to remedy what has been done in the past," Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture, told journalists.

Former US president Bill Clinton said Wednesday he fears a new wave of deaths in Haiti stemming from poor sanitary conditions in the wake of the devastating January earthquake. "My biggest worry in Haiti today is that sanitary conditions will lead to a second round of death in the rain season," Clinton, a UN special envoy for Haiti, told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

A missile strike by a US drone aircraft hit Pakistan's northwest tribal region near the Afghan border on Wednesday, killing at least four militants, security officials said. The strike took place at 8:00 pm (1500 GMT) in Mizar Madakhel village, some 50 kilometres (31 miles) west of Miranshah, the main town of the tribal North Waziristan district and a known hub of Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants.