An earthquake measuring 4.2 degrees on the Richter scale Thursday hit Lima, capital of Peru, and its surrounding area, but no victims or damage were reported.

The quake and another one reported on Wednesday night, were aftershocks of the 5.1-degree quake reported on Wednesday afternoon, according to authorities of the Peru Geophysics Institute.

The Thursday quake occurred at 5:42 am local time (1042 GMT) and had its epicenter 54-kilometers off the coast, southwest of ElCallao port, near Lima.

The tremor of Thursday led to rocks to fall from the summits of cliffs around Lima, just like on Wednesday afternoon.

According to geophysicist Mateo Casaverde, statistics show that every 200 or 300 years a large-scale earthquake hits Peru.

On June 23, 2001, a 6.9-Richter-degree quake killed 115 people, injured 1,500 and left 100,000 homeless in Peru.

US scientists create world's first cloned mule

For the first time, scientists in the United States have successfully cloned a mule, an achievement which has the potential to advance the study of human cancer.

The baby mule, born on May 4 and named Idaho Gem, was cloned using DNA taken from a fetal mule cell established in 1998, researchers from the University of Idaho and Utah State University said Thursday.

A mule results from a cross between a female horse and a male donkey. As hybrids, mules are sterile, except in extremely rare cases.

Idaho Gem is the first clone of a hybrid animal, and is also the first member of the horse family to be cloned, claimed the researchers, who published their results in the latest issue of the journal Science.

While a variety of other cloned animals were born in recent years, clones of horse or their relatives have been elusive. Horses are notoriously difficult to operate using modern biotechnology. Worldwide, only two "test-tube" horse foals were conceived from in vitro fertilization experiments.

The creators of Idaho Gem started their cloning efforts in 1998.After the apparent failure in the first few years, the researchers found evidence indicating that equine reproduction may involve unusually high levels of intracellular calcium.

By increasing the calcium levels in the solution containing the cloned mule embryos before they were implanted into surrogate female horses, the researchers produced 19 pregnancies out of 305 attempts. In addition to the birth of Idaho Gem, two pregnancies are now in the advanced stages .

According to the researchers, the same chemistry that led to the successful cloning of the mule may shed new light on the causes of specific cancers in humans.

"The contrasts and similarities between humans and horses at the cellular level provide a number of insights about how the relationship of certain chemicals in the body affect both normal and abnormal cell activity," Gordon Woods, a professor at the University of Idaho who led the research, said in a statement.

US freezes assets of Al-Aqsa Foundation

The United States issued an order to freeze financial assets of Al-Aqsa Foundation, a group it suspects of supporting terrorist activities, officials said Thursday.

The US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the decision Thursday after the British government took the same action.

US officials suspected that the foundation is funneling money to Hamas, an Islamic militant group. The foundation has offices in countries including Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Pakistan. It was not clear whether the foundation has assets in the United States.

As part of the war on terror, the Bush Administration has ordered to block all assets which might become the financial sources for terrorist groups.

Sharon demands Abbas to crack down on militants

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Thursday night demanded his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas to crack down on militants as outlined in a US-backed roadmap peace plan.

After a three-hour meeting between the two leaders in Jerusalem, Sharon's office said in a statement that the prime minister demanded that Abbas take concrete measures to tackle "terrorists", including dismantling terrorist organizations, arresting terrorists and confiscating illegal weapons."

This was the second meeting between Sharon and Abbas in the past two weeks.