Reuters World News Highlights at 0600 GMT, Apr 03
April 3 (Reuters) - TOP STORIES
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PAJU, South Korea - North Korea on Wednesday closed access to a joint factory zone that earns $2 billion a year in trade for the impoverished state but will allow hundreds of South Koreans to return home, officials said, allaying fears they could have been held hostage.
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UNITED NATIONS - The 193-nation U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the first treaty on the global arms trade, which seeks to regulate the $70 billion business in conventional arms and keep weapons out of the hands of human rights abusers.
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KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia - The island of Borneo may be all that stands between Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and an unprecedented election defeat within weeks for his ruling coalition.
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SABANETA, Venezuela - Venezuelan acting President Nicolas Maduro made a pilgrimage to late socialist leader Hugo Chavez's birthplace on Tuesday and pledged to win the April 14 election in his honor.
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NEW YORK - A high-ranking Democratic New York State senator was arrested on Tuesday and charged with trying to buy a place on the Republican ticket in the city's mayoral race, in what prosecutors said was part of a bribery scandal that reflected pervasive corruption in New York politics.
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WASHINGTON/CHICAGO - The White House unveiled a sweeping new initiative on Tuesday to map the individual cells and circuits that make up the human brain, a project that will give scientists a better understanding of how a healthy brain works and how to devise better treatments for injuries and diseases of the brain.
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Tuesday letting him pick candidates to lead Russia's regions if local lawmakers scrap popular polls, in what critics called a setback for democracy in the Russian leader's new term.
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VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis, who has said he wants the Catholic Church to be a model of austerity and honesty, could restructure or even close the Vatican's scandal-ridden bank as part of a broad review of its troubled bureaucracy, Vatican sources say.
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ROME - Italian President Giorgio Napolitano expressed despair on Tuesday at fierce criticism of his latest plan to end a post-election deadlock that has raised fears of months of instability in the euro zone's third largest economy.
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WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Mark Kirk announced on Tuesday that he supports gay marriage, suggesting a brush with death had helped shift his attitude as he became the second Republican to join dozens of Democratic senators who back homosexuals' right to wed.
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WASHINGTON - U.S. regulators said on Tuesday that companies can use Twitter, Facebook and other social media to make key announcements as long as they tell investors which sites they will use, an effort to help companies navigate the new media age.
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SAO PAULO - Prosecutors charged four people with manslaughter on Tuesday for their roles in the Jan. 27 nightclub fire that killed 241 people in southern Brazil, saying they overlooked grave safety irregularities.
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BRUSSELS - Crunch talks aimed at ending the ethnic partition of Serbia's former Kosovo province broke up without result on Wednesday, in a major setback for Serbia's hopes of starting European Union membership negotiations this year.