AFP - Japan and Australia moved Tuesday to shore up consumer and investor confidence, as governments around the world took new steps to ease the global financial crisis -- and saw stocks soar in response.

Reuters - A long-term analysis of people who took the arthritis drug Vioxx confirms it doubles the risk of strokes and heart attacks, researchers said on Monday, but this risk goes away a year after people stop taking it.

Reuters - Icelandic officials will discuss a loan to help the island's financial sector with Russia's Finance Ministry on Tuesday but the official delegation list does not include any ministers or the central bank chief.

Reuters - North Korea on Monday restored U.N. monitors' access to its atom bomb complex and will resume disabling its nuclear reactor on Tuesday, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said, after a deal with Washington to save the process.

Reuters - Deadly wind-driven brush fires roared out of the foothills and canyons on the northern fringe of Los Angeles on Monday, destroying dozens of homes and threatening hundreds of more dwellings.

Reuters - Morgan Stanley stock nearly doubled after Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc (MUFG) completed its $9 billion investment in the bank on Monday.

Reuters - Democrat Barack Obama has opened a 6-point lead over Republican John McCain one day before the White House rivals meet in their final debate, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Tuesday.

Reuters - Global investors piled into equities for the second day in a row on Tuesday, dumping relatively safer assets as they took comfort from concerted efforts by governments to shore up the financial system. Much of the trading was unwinding panic moves from last week when fears about the worst financial crisis in nearly 80 years swept across the world.

Reuters - The United States will announce plans on Tuesday to inject $250 billion into its banks, following similar, concerted measures in Europe to revive money markets and stave off global recession.

AP - B.J. Upton, Evan Longoria and the rest of the Tampa Bay Rays are bashing their way through their first trip to the playoffs. Upton and Longoria homered off a suddenly shaky Jon Lester, and the power-packed Rays cleared the Green Monster four times to beat the Boston Red Sox 9-1 Monday for a 2-1 lead in the AL championship series.

AP - The Philadelphia Phillies used their favorite staple, the long ball, to move within one win of the World Series.

AP - The doctor has again ordered Janet Jackson to postpone a return to her "Rock Witchu" tour.

AP - Nearly one in three patients who need a kidney transplant may never get one because their bodies are abnormally primed to attack a donated organ. Now doctors are trying new ways to outwit the immune system and save more of those so-called "highly sensitized" patients — often with kidneys donated by living donors, considered the optimal kind.

AP - A double murderer who says he's too fat to be executed humanely has passed a pre-execution exam and is cleared to receive a lethal injection Tuesday.

AP - Canada's Conservative prime minister appeared poised to retain his job in Tuesday's national election but he faced a greater challenge in winning a parliamentary marjority to bolster his power.