World Highlights

¤ President George W. Bush nominated White House insider Harriet Miers for a Supreme Court vacancy, triggering outrage from Conservatives who questioned whether she would uphold their political views.

Mr Bush chose Ms Miers, a lawyer but not a judge whose opinions on key issues likely to come before the high court are largely unknown, to replace the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor.

¤ Indonesian police scrutinised amateur video that showed a man apparently with a backpack entering a Bali restaurant seconds before one of three suicide blasts that killed as many as 22 people.

The tape, and photos of three severed heads believed to be those of the bombers, were being widely shown by Indonesian media as the country launched a huge manhunt for the masterminds of Saturday's attacks.

¤ Two Australians won the Nobel prize for medicine for showing that a bacterium rather than stress causes stomach inflammation and ulcers, after one of them drank a witches' brew of bacteria to prove the point.

Experts said the discovery of the Helicobacter pylori bacterium by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren in 1982 was met with scepticism by the medical community, which did not think bacteria could survive in the acid conditions of the stomach.

¤ Simultaneous bomb explosions rocked three Bangladesh towns, killing at least two people and wounding 10, less than two months after hundreds of blasts went off across the country on a single day.

Police said the bombs rocked courtrooms - one in the town of Chandpur, 170 kilometres southeast of the capital, Dhaka, another in nearby Laxmipur town and one or two more in the port city of Chittagong.

¤ Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder signalled he may be ready to give up power two weeks after Germany's most inconclusive post-war election, saying he would accept whatever his party decides.

For the first time since his Social Democrats (SPD) finished behind Angela Merkel's conservatives in the September 18 election that produced a hung parliament, Mr Schroeder said he would not stand in the way if a stable government could be formed by the two main parties.