The Western-Arab drive to adopt a UN resolution on Syria is a "path to civil war", Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov has warned.

He said demands for President Bashar al-Assad to stand down would "not lead to a search for compromise".

The resolution will be discussed at an imminent UN Security Council meeting on the deepening Syrian crisis.

The talks come after a day of particularly heavy bloodshed and with the army on the streets in Damascus.

Yemen's newly appointed information minister has escaped an assassination attempt as he was leaving government headquarters in the capital Sanaa.

Ali Ahmed al-Amrani was unhurt in Tuesday's attack, that left his vehicle riddled with bullets fired as the minister was leaving a weekly cabinet meeting.

Polling booths have opened in Florida, the largest state so far to take part in the Republican race for the White House, with Mitt Romney holding a solid lead over Newt Gingrich in the latest polls.

Voting precincts opened at 7am (12:00GMT) on Tuesday, in the winner-take-all Sunshine State, which offers the prize of 50 delegates - the biggest bounty yet in the contest for the chance to challenge Barack Obama in November.

The UN and human rights groups have condemned a Haitian court's decision not to charge Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the country former dictator, over allegations of torture and murder.

Duvalier will face trial for corruption during his 15-year rule, but not for human rights abuses, Carves Jean, the judge handling the case, said on Monday.

"I did not find enough legal grounds to keep human rights charges and crimes against humanity against him," he said. "Now my job is over. The case is no longer in my hands."

AFP - Senegal's interior ministry has lifted a ban on an opposition rally due to take place on Tuesday afternoon against President Abdoulaye Wade's plans to seek a third term in office, the organisers said.

Mor Ngom, of the June 23 Movement of opposition parties and civil society opposed to Wade's elections plans, said authorities had "accepted" the holding of a mass rally.

Dozens of riot policeman watched from a distance as people began arriving at the Place de l'Obelisque square in the working class suburb of Colobane on Tuesday afternoon.

America's top intelligence official has claimed that Iran's leadership was now more willing than before to carry out an attack inside the US, and that intelligence agencies were worried about plots against US and allied interests around the world.

In a report to Congress, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said a plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant - which the US blamed on Iran's Revolutionary Guard - "shows that some Iranian officials, probably including supreme leader Ali Khamenei, have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime".

China's Vice Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng on Tuesday summoned Sudan's Charge d'Affaires in Beijing and lodged urgent representations to the African country over local rebels' attack on a camp belonging to a Chinese company.

Twenty-nine Chinese nationals were abducted after the attack, according to a press release from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting overseas Chinese nationals," Xie told Sudan's Charge d'Affaires Omer Eisa Ahmed, as quoted in the release.

An armed group blasted an oil pipeline Tuesday in restive Baba Amro area in central province of Homs, as part of a string of explosions targeting the energy sector in Syria, state-run SANA news agency reported.

The blast, which occurred also near the Basatin Joubar area, set a plastic factory ablaze, the governor of Homs said in a phone call with Xinhua.

He said that firefighters are still extinguishing the fire caused by the blast, which is the third in a series of other explosions occurred this week.

Long convoys of Chinese lorries laden with rice were seen entering North Korea after Beijing reportedly agreed to provide major food aid to Pyongyang's new regime, a South Korean activist said Tuesday.

Thousands of lorries delivered rice to the hungry North starting on January 9, said Do Hee-Yoon of the Seoul-based Citizens' Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees.

On Monday a Japanese newspaper said Chinese leaders had agreed on the aid at a meeting on December 20, the day after North Korea announced the death of its longtime leader Kim Jong-Il.

The deliveries lasted about 10 days before the Lunar New Year holiday on January 23, Do told AFP.

As evidence, he presented pictures taken near the customs office in the northeastern town of Tumen on the Chinese side of the border on January 12.

The Cuban Triangle: Cuba's Communist Party met over the weekend and decided that top party and government officials will be limited to two five-year terms, which would have put Fidel and Raul Castro themselves into retirement decades ago.

Mexico: Illicit Financial Flows, Macroeconomic Imbalances, and the Underground Economy, (PDF): Utilizing well established economic models, our analysis indicates illicit outflows from Mexico from 1970 to 2010 at US$872 billion. Across the first decade of this century, these outflows averaged
almost US$50 billion a year. Furthermore, this analysis is conservative; it does not include drug smuggling, human trafficking, and some forms of trade mispricing, data for which are not available in the statistics we analyze. Were reasonable estimates of illicit capital generated by these activities to be incorporated into the analysis, the figures would be substantially higher.

Colombia Reports: The total amount of money embezzled from the Colombian healthcare system exceeds $5 billion, the president of the country's medical federation said Tuesday.

Colombia Reports: Now-extradited paramilitary leader "Don Berna" told the truth about his ties to the administration of former President Alvaro Uribe, says convicted "parapolitician" Rocio Arias. The former senator was one of the first Colombian lawmakers to be convicted for her ties to the paramilitary AUC and considered one of the organization's main representatives in Congress until her conviction.

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- A Mexican army general and 29 soldiers under his command in a town on the border with Texas are being tried on charges of torture, homicide, drug trafficking and other crimes, a top government official confirmed Tuesday.

The new Knesset will also represent the failure of the two-state solution as a political platform. While in theory there is a virtual consensus around the need to establish a Palestinian state, there is no longer any Knesset members who remain its passionate advocates, like Yossi Beilin or Shimon Peres used to be. The intellectual conversation has shifted its attention to the one-state solution. Though this idea is still widely denounced and opposed as a theoretical solution, the new Knesset could mark the first definitive break by moving the political conversation into firmly one-state territory, if only as a by-product of having killed off all other possible alternatives.