Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem on Thursday urged all political parties in Lebanon to join a new government headed by Najib Miqati and opposed by outgoing Premier Saad Hariri.

"We call on all parties to join the Miqati cabinet, and Syria is ready to cooperate with this government," Muallem told a joint news conference with his British counterpart William Hague.

Sony said Thursday the successor to its PlayStation Portable machine will go on sale late this year, offering the quality of a home console in an on-the-go machine boasting a screen double the size of smart phones.

The NGP, short for "next generation portable," has a touch panel in the front and touch pads in the back to allow players to tap on the machine to move images, in addition to the usual buttons and switches.

Federal health officials said Wednesday they are investigating a possible link between breast implants and a very rare form of cancer, raising new questions about the safety of devices which have been scrutinized for decades.

The cancer, known as anaplastic large cell lymphoma, attacks lymph nodes and the skin and has been reported in the scar tissue which grows around an implant. The Food and Drug Administration is asking doctors to report all cases of the cancer so the agency can better understand the association.

The head of the Arab League said Wednesday that Arabs were angry and frustrated and "the name of the game is reform" — a call lent urgency by turmoil of recent days, when a corrupt regime was overthrown in Tunisia and several people died in anti-government riots in Egypt.

Arab League's Secretary-General Amr Moussa, who is Egyptian, spoke to reporters at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where a panel of Mideast economic experts convened separately to tackle the same question — and generally agreed the region needs better education, more transparent regimes, and cleverer business strategies.

At least 1,000 people have been detained in Egypt since Tuesday, in the most serious protests against President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year-rule, a security official said on Thursday, as activists vowed to continue rallying.

"At least 1,000 people have been detained around the country since the demonstrations started," on Tuesday, the official told Agence France Presse.

An explosion likely caused by a methane gas buildup ripped through an underground coal mine in Colombia during a shift change Wednesday, killing 21 workers, officials said. A similar fatal blast occurred at the same mine four years ago.

Five of the victims died at the mine's entrance and by afternoon two bodies had been removed from the mine with another 14 left to recover, said the provincial Colombian Red Cross director, Johel Enrique Rodriguez.

Prime Minister-designate Najib Miqati on Wednesday said that forming a technocrat government is "one of the options, but it's not the only one."

In an interview on OTV, Miqati noted that he will not bind himself to a deadline in forming Lebanon's new Cabinet.

Jo Shapcott has been named as the surprise winner of Britain's Costa Book of the Year award for her slim volume of poetry in part inspired by a battle against breast cancer.

It is the second year in a row that poetry has picked up the 30,000-pound (47,000-dollar, 35,000-euro) honor and commentators said the result was evidence of a "renaissance" in the genre's fortunes.

Oil prices hovered near $86 a barrel Wednesday in Asia, consolidating losses after falling more than 4 percent in less than a week on mixed economic news and the possibility of increased OPEC production.

Benchmark crude for March delivery was up 26 cents at $86.45 a barrel at early afternoon Bangkok time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract lost $1.68 to settle at $86.19 on Tuesday.

Pleading for unity in a newly divided government, President Barack Obama implored Democratic and Republican lawmakers to rally behind his vision of economic revival for an anxious nation, declaring in his State of the Union address Tuesday night: "We will move forward together or not at all."

The president unveiled an agenda of carefully balanced political goals: a burst of spending on education, research, technology and transportation to make the nation more competitive, alongside pledges, in the strongest terms of his presidency, to cut the deficit and smack down spending deemed wasteful to America. Yet he never explained how he'd pull that off or what specifically would be cut.