World Highlights

o Police banned any gathering that might provoke disorder in Paris this weekend, saying they had been warned violence was planned for today after two weeks of rioting across France. Ten vehicles were burned in the southwestern city of Toulouse yesterday evening, local authorities said, in the 16th consecutive night of civil unrest. The intensity of France's most serious unrest in four decades has dropped since President Jacques Chirac's government adopted emergency measures including curfews on Tuesday to curb unrest by youngsters complaining of racism and unemployment.

o Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's deputy, Izzat Ibrahim, has died, Al Arabiya satellite television quoted a Baath party statement as saying yesterday. Mr Ibrahim was the most senior member of the former regime still at large and had been a top insurgent leader. He is number six on the US military's list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis, with a $10 million reward offered for his capture.

o The Hague tribunal dramatically turned up the heat on Serbia yesterday, telling it to deliver top war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic by the end of this year or face "excommunication", Defence Minister Zoran Stankovic said. The seven-week deadline was issued on a visit to Belgrade by United Nations war crimes tribunal president Theodor Meron, tightening the screws on Serbia as it faces talks that could lead to the loss of its Albanian-dominated province of Kosovo, which has been under UN control for the past six years.

o Pakistani police used canes against people living in an informal tent camp in the earthquake-hit city of Muzaffarabad yesterday, after they protested against plans to evict them, witnesses said. Aid organisations are alarmed at the potential for diseases in several spontaneous camps that have sprung up in the quake zone, and the World Health Organisation is testing to see whether cholera has already broken out.

o Swedish police evacuated a small regional airport yesterday after a report of a bomb threat, which turned out to be false. Police at first said they received a report from an airline employee about a suspected suicide bomber at the airport in the town of Karlstad in central Sweden, which is around 200 km west of Stockholm.

o A cargo airplane ploughed into a mountain near the Afghan capital of Kabul yesterday killing all eight of its mostly Russian crew, officials said. Hours after the crash, a Taliban commander telephoned Reuters saying the Islamist rebels had shot down the plane, but Western military officials said the cause of crash was unknown.