WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Authorities declared an overnight curfew for Saturday after a major earthquake hit New Zealand's second biggest city, Christchurch, bringing down power lines and bridges and wrecking roads and building facades.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pro-Taliban Pakistani militants are trying to create a sectarian rift, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Saturday, as a new wave of violence piled pressure on a government already struggling with a flood crisis.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to a series of direct talks on Thursday, seeking to forge the framework for a U.S.-backed peace deal within a year and end a conflict that has boiled for six decades.

HOUSTON (Reuters) - BP Plc successfully replaced a failed blowout preventer from atop its ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well late on Friday, the top U.S. official overseeing the spill response said.

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Three people were arrested after protesters threw eggs and shoes at former British Prime Minister Tony Blair when he arrived to sign copies of his memoir at a bookshop in Dublin on Saturday, national broadcaster RTE said.

LONDON (Reuters) - Metro Bank, whose launch in July marked the birth of Britain's first new high street retail bank in more than 100 years, said on Friday it was creating 100 new jobs.

LONDON (Reuters) - Nearly six million people are to be told they have paid the wrong amount of tax, and authorities will demand about 2 billion pounds more from hundreds of thousands of taxpayers, HM Revenue and Customs said on Saturday.

KABUL (Reuters) - International forces in Afghanistan have at times overstated the progress being made this year, the deputy commander of the NATO-led force said on Saturday, with advances coming slower than originally expected.

HALIFAX, Canada (Reuters) - Hurricane Earl made landfall in Canada on Saturday after a series of scares along the U.S. East Coast, flooding roads, felling trees and cutting power to tens of thousands in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Concerns over Israeli access to BlackBerry data, and the use of the device by the United States to spy on the United Arab Emirates are behind the Gulf state's moves to curb the smartphone, Dubai's police chief said.