WASHINGTON - THE White House on Monday accused ex-vice president Dick Cheney of re-fighting the Republican Party's 2008 election defeat, after his latest attack on President Barack Obama's security policy.

Mr Cheney maintained in a Sunday television interview that tough Bush administration interrogations of suspected Al-Qaeda militants had saved 'perhaps hundreds of thousands' of US lives.

OSLO - A GUNMAN shot dead two women in a suburb of the Norwegian capital Oslo on Monday before killing himself after what appeared to be a domestic incident, police said.

A woman in her 50s and a second, still to be identified, younger woman were gunned down outside a house in Nesoeya, a residential district to the west of Oslo, police spokesman Per Zimmer told a press conference.

LONDON - TWO men beheaded in Saudi Arabia at the weekend were minors when they committed the crimes, Amnesty International said on Monday, condemning the executions as 'deplorable.'

The London-based rights organisation said two of five men beheaded Sunday were convicted of offences, including the abduction and rape of children, theft and consumption of alcohol and drugs, committed when they were 17 years old.