New York's Tribeca Film Festival, created a decade ago after the 9/11 attacks, opens Thursday with a touch of sparkle from Cannes thanks to new artistic director Frederic Boyer.

Boyer joined festival founders Robert De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal for an opening presentation Wednesday in lower Manhattan where movies will be shown until April 29.

Discovery on Thursday will become the first spaceship of the retired U.S. shuttle fleet to enter its permanent home as a museum artifact, marking a solemn end to the 30-year U.S. space flight program.

A team of about 20 veteran astronauts who flew to space aboard Discovery will surround the celebrated spacecraft and escort it to a branch of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum outside the U.S. capital.

An FBI agent testifying in the trial of the suspected Bali bomb-maker said Thursday the accused had been identified as an explosives expert by other Islamic militants and had planned to kill U.S. troops.

Indonesian prosecutors accuse Umar Patek, who was arrested last year in the same Pakistani town where U.S. commandos later killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, of constructing the bombs that killed 202 people, mostly Westerners.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney has closed the gap with U.S. President Barack Obama and the two are now neck and neck in the White House race, a poll released Wednesday shows.

Romney, the party's presumptive nominee now that his main Republican rival has folded up his campaign, matched Obama 46-46 percent among registered voters who were asked in a CBS News/New York Times poll who they would vote for if the election were today.

The United States said Tuesday that persistent violence in Syria was "unacceptable" and demanded that President Bashar al-Assad do more to comply with a peace plan to end months of bloodshed.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that a ceasefire -- which went into force on Thursday -- was eroding due to the daily violence and said that the opposition was upholding its side of the peace deal.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange interviewed Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Tuesday in the debut of his "The World Tomorrow" talk show on Russia's state-funded RT cable broadcaster.

Assange remains under house arrest and was speaking from his study in London to Nasrallah at his Lebanese office via a computer video link.

The United States warned Monday that heightened violence in Syria threatens the sending of a full U.N. ceasefire observer mission as it voiced fear that a ceasefire is "eroding."

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said new attacks by government forces "call into question the wisdom and viability" of sending the full 200 international monitors.

A Briton convicted of involvement in an al-Qaida airline shoebombing attempt is to give evidence in the U.S. trial of a man accused of plotting to bomb New York's subway, prosecutors said Monday.

Britain's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said Saajid Muhammad Badat -- who was jailed for 13 years in 2005 -- had entered into an agreement to testify in a New York Court against Adis Medunjanin in a trial starting Monday.

A delegation from Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's movement on Monday visited a suspected Hizbullah member being held in a Baghdad jail, the movement said.

"A delegation made up of three of Moqtada al-Sadr's advisers met today in a Baghdad prison with Ali Moussa Daqdouq," an official of the Sadr movement told Agence France Presse in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

The U.S. State Department on Sunday called the wave of coordinated attacks across Afghanistan "cowardly," and praised the "swift and effective response" of Afghan forces.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Ryan Crocker, to "discuss the cowardly attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan" and to confirm U.S. personnel were safe, the State Department said.