Reuters World News Highlights

SEOUL – North Korea intensified threats of an imminent conflict against the United States and the South on Tuesday, warning foreigners to evacuate South Korea to avoid being dragged into “thermonuclear war”.

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SAN FRANCISCO – The second-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said she will resign shortly, ending four years as a champion of a civilian-controlled Internet.

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DUBAI – A powerful earthquake struck close to Iran’s only nuclear power station on Tuesday, killing 32 people and injuring 850 as it destroyed homes and devastated two small villages, Iranian media reported.

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DUBAI/VIENNA – Iran said on Tuesday operations had begun at two uranium mines and a milling plant and that Western opposition would not slow its nuclear work, days after talks with world powers made no breakthrough.

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LONDON – Admirers of Margaret Thatcher on Tuesday mourned the “Iron Lady” who as Britain’s longest serving prime minister in over a century pitched free-market capitalism as the only medicine for her country’s crippled economy and the crumbling Soviet bloc.

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TOKYO – The company that runs a Japanese nuclear power plant destroyed by a tsunami two years ago said on Tuesday it was losing faith in temporary storage pits for radioactive water – but it doesn’t have anywhere else to put it.

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ROME – Italian centre-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani met his centre-right rival Silvio Berlusconi on Tuesday to discuss the election for the next president of the Republic, offering hope of a breakthrough in the deadlock left by elections in February.