The five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany on Tuesday offered direct dialogue with Iran to solve the ongoing nuclear standoff with the Islamic Republic. 

A joint statement from the six nations -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the US plus Germany -- called on Iran to "take this opportunity for engagement with us and thereby maximize opportunities for a negotiated way forward.

"We remain firmly committed to a comprehensive diplomatic solution, including through direct dialogue," the so-called P5+1 nations said in a statement read to a closed-door meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors in Vienna.

The six voiced serious concern at Iran's atomic advances and increasing restrictions on UN inspectors trying to keep track of them, but did not mention toughening sanctions as a way to rein in Iran.

Sanctions threats have been common in statements by Western members at earlier IAEA meetings. But Russia and China oppose further punitive steps.

RAMALLAH, West Bank:

The U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, held talks on Wednesday with Palestinian leaders over whether Israel's next government would commit to a U.S.-backed peace process leading to a Palestinian state.

A day after pledging that the Obama administration would always protect Israel's security, Clinton visited the Israeli-occupied West Bank to deliver a message of support for President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.

"We are very committed to your efforts in this leadership of President Abbas," Clinton told Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the point man in Western-backed reconstruction plans for the Gaza Strip that freeze out the territory's Hamas  rulers.

Hamas, which won a parliamentary election in 2006, violently wrested control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas's Fatah faction in 2007. The West shuns Hamas over its refusal to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept existing interim peace deals.

Addressing congress Gordon Brown hailed the special relationship saying, "There is no power on Earth that can drive us apart."

He also issued a call for America to take a lead in the world's battle against recession and climate change.

In a speech to both houses of Congress, the Prime Minister urged the US political elite to "seize the moment" by joining Britain and the rest of the world in international cooperation to tackle the economic crisis and "build tomorrow today".

The International Criminal Court at the Hague issued an arrest warrant Wednesday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for a five-year campaign of violence in Darfur.

It is the first arrest warrant ever issued for a sitting head of state by the world's only permanent war crimes tribunal.

Bashir is charged with seven counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The warrant does not mention genocide, but the court may issue an amended warrant to include that charge later, ICC spokeswoman Laurence Blairon said.

China's national Legislature begins its tightly scripted annual meeting on Thursday with an agenda dominated by the ruling Communist Party's two overriding concerns: riding out the global economic crisis and keeping citizens' unhappiness with their lot from boiling over into public unrest.

In the nine-day session of the National People's Congress, about the only suspense involves whether the government will propose to add still more stimulus spending to the $584 billion that China's leaders already have pledged to help the slumping economy. On Wednesday, Asian and European stocks rose in part on hopes that it would.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is to speak early on Thursday to the 3,000-odd delegates, and is expected by many analysts to set a target for 8 percent growth of China's gross domestic product in 2009, the same as in previous years. The government has long said that that rate is needed to hold down unemployment and the potential for social unrest. The economy logged a 9 percent rate last year, even after a sharp slowdown in the last quarter.

But a number of experts believe that a 2009 growth rate of 6.5 percent or 7 percent, meager by recent Chinese standards, is increasingly likely. Some financial analysts predicted this week that the government will propose spending vast new amounts to head off a sharper decline, although the consensus view is that new spending, if any, will be more modest.

Business owners, law enforcement officers, journalists and other professionals are among those seeking asylum in the U.S. -- even when it means sitting in jail...

The number of asylum requests filed at U.S. border entries by Mexican nationals nearly doubled to almost 200 in the last fiscal year, and the pace has increased this year. Seventy Mexican asylum-seekers filed petitions in the first quarter, most of them in El Paso and San Diego. The figures are small compared with the vast scale of illegal immigration, but many fear explosive growth if the bloodshed worsens.

Drug violence in Mexico has claimed at least 7,000 lives in little more than a year, most of them along the border and many carried out to maximize their gruesome effect. Mass killings and beheadings have had a terrorizing effect on border towns from Texas to Tijuana...

Asylum-seekers are among the most desperate people confronting immigration officials. Deporting them to their homeland can be a death sentence. But under U.S. law, fear of criminal violence is not recognized as grounds for asylum.