World Highlights

¤ Tropical storm Vince became the first tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in Iberia, bringing heavy rain and winds to southern Spain and Portugal, meteorologists said yesterday. Vince developed into a hurricane in an unusual location near Madeira in the mid-Atlantic on Sunday but gradually lost strength as it moved northeast towards Iberia, skimming Portugal's south before hitting land in Spain early yesterday. Vince was downgraded on Monday to a tropical storm by the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami.

¤ Britain and France put new pressure on Iran yesterday to obey international rules over its nuclear programme and underlined the intention of the United States and European powers to ensure it does so. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow also shared the goal of preventing nuclear proliferation, but he cautioned against doing anything that might threaten the work of the UN nuclear agency in Iran.

¤ Insurgents killed 18 Afghan policemen in an ambush in the southern province of Helmand, a government spokesman said yesterday, in the latest spate of violence by suspected Taliban militants. It is the deadliest attack on the German-trained Afghan national police since US-led forces overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001.

¤ Three former Yugoslav army officers knowingly allowed soldiers under their command to commit mass murder in the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991, prosecutors said at the start of their trial yesterday. More than 200 people were removed from a hospital in the town and taken to a farm where they were shot and buried in a mass grave. The massacre has came to symbolise the brutality of wars that tore apart Yugoslavia in the 1990s.