NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Thursday said he chose a former top state judge to oversee probes into whether Governor David Paterson wrongly accepted World Series baseball tickets or the state police had tried to quash a domestic violence charge against an aide to the governor.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama pressed China on Thursday to move to a "more market-oriented exchange rate" in a speech where he laid out a plan to boost U.S. exports in the coming years.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell only slightly last week, indicating that rapid job growth would probably continue to elude the economy for a while.

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chile's navy lifted a tsunami warning for the country's coast after strong aftershocks shook the capital Santiago on Thursday, following the swearing in ceremony for new President Sebastian Pinera.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki posted mixed results in initial returns on Thursday from Iraq's parliamentary election, and a rival grouping complained of serious fraud.

OSLO (Reuters) - A record 237 people and organizations have been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, with interest boosted by last year's award to President Barack Obama, organizers said on Wednesday.

KABUL (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Defense Secretary Robert Gates traded barbs on Wednesday during briefly overlapping visits to Afghanistan, where Washington has troops at war but Tehran has growing clout.

LOS ANGELES/DETROIT (Reuters) - U.S. safety regulators and Toyota dispatched teams on Tuesday to inspect a Prius that sped out of control on a California freeway a day earlier, as the automaker struggled to reassure consumers shaken by its recall crisis.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A television producer pleaded guilty Tuesday to trying to extort $2 million from U.S. talk show host David Letterman by threatening to reveal his affairs with women who worked on his late-night program on CBS.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional Democrats on Tuesday cast doubt on their chances of meeting the White House's March 18 deadline for voting on a stalled healthcare overhaul, but said they are moving as fast as they can.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama launched a sharp attack on health insurers on Monday and called on his fellow Democrats to rise above politics and pass a healthcare overhaul in the next few weeks.

DETROIT (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp said it had found no flaw with its throttle controls as it seeks to dismiss an external study critical of its electronic safety systems.

DOGO NAHAWA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Villagers in central Nigeria buried dozens of bodies, including those of women and children, in a mass grave on Monday after attacks in which several hundred people were feared to have been killed.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood finally entrusted a female director with an Oscar on Sunday.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Foreign Minister said on Sunday new sanctions on Iran will not solve the standoff over its nuclear program, while chiding the United States after two months of tensions between the big powers.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama dispatches his vice president to the Middle East on Sunday to try to build support for reviving Israeli-Palestinian peace talks despite deep skepticism on both sides.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - So few voters approve of the way embattled New York Governor David Paterson is handling his job that his newest approval rating is among the lowest in recent records, according to a poll released on Friday.

CONCEPCION, Chile (Reuters) - A series of strong aftershocks rattled south-central Chile on Friday, panicking residents nearly a week after one of the most powerful earthquakes on record devastated coastal towns and killed hundreds of people.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A California man who was fatally shot after opening fire on security officers outside the Pentagon appears to have been acting alone, with no links to domestic or international terrorism, police said on Friday.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece targeted civil servants, the rich and the church Wednesday in a sweeping new 4.8 billion euro ($6.5 billion) austerity program designed to secure European help to tackle its crippling debt burden.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's cabinet approved a sweeping new austerity program on Wednesday, the third in as many months, to rein in a bulging budget deficit and secure European financial support, a government source said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Support grew for changes to vehicle braking systems, as a congressional hearing into unintended acceleration confronted Toyota Motor Corp executives with a 2006 internal document warning of quality problems.

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic Tuesday described the two worst atrocities of the 1992-95 Bosnian war as myths perpetuated by Bosnian Muslims and categorically denied his involvement.

DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co is recalling 1.3 million compact cars in North America to address a power steering problem that has been linked to 14 crashes and one injury, the company said on Tuesday.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Working with the food industry to cut salt intake by nearly 10 percent could prevent hundreds of thousands of heart attacks and strokes over several decades and save the U.S. government $32 billion in healthcare costs, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

PARIS/VIENNA (Reuters) - Russia will back new sanctions against Iran as long as they do not create a humanitarian crisis, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Monday after talks with Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev.

PARIS (Reuters) - Storms swept through western Europe at the weekend, killing up to 50 people in France and threatening further damage as powerful winds and torrential rains moved north, officials said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Vice President Al Gore took aim at skeptics who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change, saying he wished it were an illusion but that the problem is real and urgent.

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - These Winter Olympics showed London 2012 that great sport and people of passion will help you overcome any number of problems, while a home gold rush can set a Games on the way to greatness.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli police entered the compound housing Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque Sunday and fired tear gas and rubber bullets after Palestinians threw stones at visitors to the site.

TOKYO (Reuters) - A strong earthquake hit Japan's southern island of Okinawa early on Saturday and Japan's weather agency issued a tsunami warning for up to 2 meters, but this was later lifted and there were no reports of major damage.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Governor David Paterson on Friday abandoned his campaign to seek a new term in November, battered by questions of impropriety and growing pressure to quit the race.

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Clutching automatic assault rifles, truckloads of U.N. troops patrolled the streets of Haiti's shattered capital on the day after the earthquake hit last month, seemingly oblivious to the misery around them.

LONDON (Reuters) - Suspected Israeli assassins have inadvertently given the world an unusual master class in clandestine killing in broadcast surveillance video of them going about their murderous trade.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Joe Biden on Friday proposed new rules to help protect U.S. workers' retirement savings as part of a broader government effort to bolster the finances of middle class voters.

KABUL (Reuters) - Taliban fighters opened fire, hurled grenades and staged suicide bombings in central Kabul on Friday, killing at least 16 people in defiance of the Western-backed government and a NATO offensive.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - An iceberg the size of Luxembourg has broken off from a glacier in Antarctica after being rammed by another giant iceberg, scientists said on Friday, in an event that could affect ocean circulation patterns.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp President Akio Toyoda had a "cordial and open" meeting on Thursday with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood before thanking workers in Kentucky for supporting him during his appearance before Congress.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The pace of global warming continues unabated, scientists said on Thursday, despite images of Europe crippled by a deep freeze and parts of the United States blasted by blizzards.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A senior Russian diplomat warned the West on Wednesday against trying to paralyze Iran by targeting the Islamic Republic's energy and banking sectors with crippling sanctions.

MILAN (Reuters) - A Milan court convicted three Google Inc executives on Wednesday for violating the privacy of an Italian boy with autism by letting a video of him being bullied be posted on the site in 2006.

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A U.S. Navy warship prevented an attack on a Tanzanian ship and apprehended eight suspected pirates in the process, the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania said on Tuesday.

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - A young pair of ice dancers lifted the host country out of its Winter Olympic gloom with a golden performance Monday just as Canadians were questioning their team's medal-winning capability.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A modest job-creation bill advanced in the Senate on Monday as the chamber's newest Republican bucked his party and sided with Democrats on a $15 billion package of tax cuts and highway spending.

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) - Former Merrill Lynch & Co President Greg Fleming is seeking $20 million from his previous employer more than a year after he left the firm, according to a Fox Business report on Monday.

BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. government analysts believe a Chinese man with government links wrote the key part of a spyware programme used in hacker attacks on Google last year, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House is strongly considering naming the chief executive of Honeywell International, a union president and a former vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve to a new panel on tackling budget deficits, an administration official said on Sunday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two U.S. drug safety reviewers have recommended that GlaxoSmithKline PLC's diabetes drug Avandia be pulled from the market after concluding it is more dangerous to the heart than a rival medicine, according to documents released on Saturday.

BOSTON (Reuters) - Smelling Democratic blood in the water, the Republican Party in Massachusetts and beyond is looking in some unlikely places for candidates for this fall's congressional elections.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian state television said the first Iranian-built destroyer was launched on Friday in a ceremony attended by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.