AFP, INDIANAPOLIS - Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton faced a new day of destiny Tuesday with Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, as the climax approached in their gripping White House race.

Opinion polls pointed to another messy draw on the biggest single day of voting left in the epic battle for the Democratic nomination, with Obama tipped to win in North Carolina and Clinton ahead in Indiana.

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A monk negotiates the devastation: aid agencies said they are being given unprecedented access after the disaster At least 15,000 people have been killed and up to 30,000 are missing after the catastrophic cyclone that struck Burma at the weekend, with officials warning that the toll was likely to rise.

Nyan Win, the Burmese Foreign Minister said on state television that 10,000 people had died in just one town, Bogalay, as he gave the first detailed account of the worst cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people died in Bangladesh.

AFP, HONG KONG  - Talks between Chinese officials and envoys from the Tibetan government-in-exile were a "good first step," one of the Dalai Lama's representatives said here on Tuesday.

"All very candid. We had very candid discussions," said Lodi Gyari, one of the Tibetan spiritual leader's envoys who met Chinese officials in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

REUTERS, Atlanta - Georgia is set to execute a convicted murderer on Tuesday, the first US inmate to be put to death since the Supreme Court ended a de facto moratorium on capital punishment last month.

William Earl Lynd is due to die by lethal injection at a prison in Jackson, central Georgia, at 7 p.m. (2300 GMT) for shooting his girlfriend Ginger Moore three times in the head and face in December 1988, authorities said.

Bojan Pancevski in Amstetten Officers investigating the incest and sexual abuse case against Josef Fritzl revealed yesterday that he started building the underground dungeon in which he imprisoned his daughter six years before her incarceration began.

Speaking to The Times at a press conference yesterday, Colonel Franz Polzer said that Mr Fritzl had planned the imprisoning and sexual abuse of Elisabeth in astonishing detail. “Fritzl acted with premeditation when he began building the underground cellar of his home in 1978,” he said.

REUTERS, YANGON - For decades, Myanmar's ruling generals have defended the military's iron grip on power as vital to keeping the former Burma intact and on the road to prosperity.

This week's devastating cyclone, which has killed at least 15,000 people in the Irrawaddy delta, has exposed the fragility of that myth with potentially major long-term implications for the junta, analysts say.

Peshawar, Pakistan, May 6 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A suspected suicide bomber blew himself near a police checkpost in the northwestern Pakistani town of Bannu on Tuesday, killing two civilians and wounding five people including a soldier, police said.

Pakistan saw a wave of suicide bomb attacks after an army assault on a radical mosque in the capital last July, but there has been a lull since the formation of new government in March that has called for talks to end the violence.

REUTRES, Timika, Indonesia - Twelve people died in a landslide near a massive copper mine operated by Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold in Indonesia's Papua province, but the firm's mining operations were unaffected, officials said on Tuesday.

A torrent of mud fell into a river, burying local miners who were working on Monday night, Godhelp Cornelis Mansnembra, the police chief in the nearest main town of Mimika, said.

REUTERS, Everest Base Camp, China - A total of 31 Chinese climbers, 22 of them ethnic Tibetans, are on Mount Everest fixing routes and repairing camps for the final assault on the summit with the Beijing Olympic torch, officials said on Tuesday.

In a departure from the usual tight control of information about the project, China mountaineering team spokesman Zhang Zhijian listed the full team of climbers, which also includes eight Han Chinese and one climber from the Tujia minority.

REUTERS, Tokyo - Chinese President Hu Jintao lauded closer cooperation with Japan when he arrived on Tuesday for a state visit intended to nurture trust between the Asian powers despite rifts over energy resources and security.

Hu was greeted in Tokyo by senior Japanese officials and flag-waving, mostly Chinese well-wishers. Downtown, some 7,000 police were deployed ahead of threatened protests by hundreds of right-wing activists who see China as a danger.

REUTERS, BANGKOK - Nearly 4,000 people were killed and thousands were missing in two of Myanmar's devastated cyclone regions, state television reported on Monday, a dramatic increase in the toll from Saturday's storm.

"The confirmed number is 3,934 dead, 41 injured and 2,879 missing within the Yangon and Irrawaddy divisions," MRTV reported as aid agencies said hundreds of thousands of people were without shelter

REUTERS, Yangon - Hundreds of thousands of people have been left without shelter and drinking water in military-ruled Myanmar after a devastating cyclone tore through the Irrawaddy delta, a United Nations official said on Monday.

Aid agencies scrambled to deliver plastic sheeting, water and cooking equipment from stockpiles in the former Burma. The government says at least 351 died in the cyclone, which tore through the delta region on Saturday before devastating Yangon.

REUTERS, Washington - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama appears to be rebounding from sliding poll numbers in the wake the controversy over his former pastor, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll released on Sunday.

Among Democratic primary voters, the Illinois senator now leads opponent Hillary Clinton by 12 points -- 50 percent to 38 percent -- the poll found.

Iran ruled out halting its disputed nuclear work on Monday, saying it would not consider any incentives offered by world powers that violated the Islamic Republic's rights to atomic technology, reports Reuters.

Six world powers agreed at a meeting in London on Friday to offer a new incentives package to coax Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, a process which the West believes Tehran wants to master so that it can build nuclear weapons.

REUTERS, SANAA - Yemen's army has warned rebels led by Abdul-Malik al-Houthi that it will move to subdue them if they fail to implement a truce brought to the verge of collapse by a mosque bombing and days of clashes.

Qatari mediators returned to Yemen's volatile northern province of Saada on Sunday, hoping to salvage the ceasefire agreement that ended six months of fighting between government forces and the rebels last June.

REUTERS, Washington - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Sunday dismissed the "elite opinion" of economists who criticized her gas tax proposal, using a term that has dogged rival Barack Obama in recent weeks.

Obama, meanwhile, accused the New York senator of pandering on gas taxes and saber rattling toward Iran as both candidates gave television interviews before primary contests in North Carolina and Indiana.

REUTERS, Jerusalem - US military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq would make it difficult to mount any attack on Iran, the Pentagon's top officer said in remarks broadcast on Monday, adding that he would prefer to avoid a new regional war.

"I actually am very hopeful that we don't get into a position where we have to get into a conflict," Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Israel's Channel Ten television when asked if he might recommend that US forces strike Iranian nuclear facilities preemptively.

REUTERS, Shelbyville, Indiana - US presidential primaries often divide party loyalists, but the drawn-out battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may leave some Democrats too bitter to band together against the Republicans in November.

Indiana homemaker Ginger Smith, 48, said she was with Clinton all the way and would not vote for Obama. "I believe a woman needs to be in the presidency," Smith said.

REUTERS, Mexico - Heavily armed men killed at least 16 people, all members of a ranchers' association, in two different massacres in southern Mexico over the weekend, Mexican media said on Sunday.

Some 40 men riding in luxury vehicles and wearing uniforms of an elite police squad shot nine people dead in the town of Petatlan in the state of Guerrero on Sunday, El Universal newspaper reported.

REUTERS, Baghdad - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has ordered the formation of a committee to compile evidence of Iranian "interference" in Iraq that will then be presented to Tehran, the government spokesman said on Sunday.

Spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh was speaking a day after a delegation from Iraq's ruling Shi'ite alliance returned from Tehran after showing Iranian officials evidence of the Islamic Republic's backing of Shi'ite militias in Iraq. Dabbagh said Iranian officials who met that delegation had denied any meddling in Iraq.