ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A suicide bomber rammed his car into a donkey cart in the northwest town of Charsadda yesterday, killing more than 20 people and wounding 45, officials said. It was the third suicide bombing since Saturday in the volatile border region, where army troops have been battling Taliban forces for the past month.

The trio of blasts has taken at least 40 lives in North-West Frontier Province in four days, including a mayor who once backed the Taliban but later led a militia against them. The latest bombings, all carried out against non-military targets, highlighted the continuing human cost of the government's decision to launch a major army offensive against one of the Taliban's main tribal sanctuaries. The violence has increasingly spilled into heavily populated areas nearby.

RIO DE JANEIRO -- A massive power failure threw Brazil's two largest cities into darkness last night along with other parts of Latin America's largest nation, affecting millions of people.

Officials did not immediately comment on the cause of the blackouts, but Brazilian media reports said there were unspecified problems at the huge Itaipu hydroelectric dam that straddles Brazil's border with Paraguay.

The problems at the dam caused a loss of 17,000 megawatts of power, resulting in outages in large parts of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and other cities in several states.

Sao Paulo is South America's largest city, with 12 million residents. Rio has 6 million citizens. But the metropolitan area of both cities are much larger.

VATICAN CITY -- Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.

"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.

Father Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results yesterday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology -- the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.

JERUSALEM -- The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has significantly expanded its ability to strike deep into Israel with rockets that can now reach the Jewish state's largest cities, and now possesses tens of thousands of projectiles, Israel's army chief said yesterday.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi were the first official assessment of the guerrilla group's capabilities since Israel seized a ship last week carrying weapons allegedly destined for Hezbollah.

Gen. Ashkenazi indicated that the arms bust had little effect in stopping what Israel says has been a massive arms buildup by the Iranian-backed militia since the sides fought a bitter monthlong war in 2006.

WOOTTON BASSETT, England -- Grieving over the death of her son in Afghanistan, the woman tore into British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"Mr. Brown, listen to me," she said. "I know every injury that my child sustained that day. I know that my son could have survived. But my son bled to death."

A tape of the 13-minute telephone conversation was broadcast by The Sun newspaper yesterday and then played over and over across Britain, a rallying cry for mounting anger over a war many now see as badly planned and impossible to win.

It came as six other British soldiers killed in Afghanistan were brought home on the eve of Remembrance Day, when Britain honors its war dead.

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