World Highlights

¤ More than four years after the September11 attacks, the Bush administration and the US Congress have failed to take the urgent steps needed to protect the country, the former September 11 Commission said in a scathing final report.

¤ Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended US treatment of terrorism suspects, telling European allies they should trust Washington and cooperate to prevent new attacks. But in a lengthy statement before leaving on a trip to Europe, Ms Rice did not directly address the allegation the CIA has run secret prisons in Eastern Europe.

¤ Romanian Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu said Romanian authorities had no evidence the CIA had used the country for either secret prisons or flights taking prisoners elsewhere.

¤ Iran's insistence on enriching uranium on its own soil amounts to a unilateral rejection of a Russian proposal to resolve a nuclear standoff with the West, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said.

¤ Gunmen seized a French engineer from outside his home in Baghdad, beating their screaming victim as they hauled him to their getaway car, neighbours said. It was the third kidnapping of Westerners in Iraq in 10 days, after a lull in such abductions in recent months.

¤ A strong earthquake jolted Africa's Great Lakes region, killing at least one person in Congo's remote east and rattling regional capitals. The US Geological Survey reported that a 6.8 magnitude quake struck near the town of Kalemie in the Democratic Republic of Congo at 1219 GMT, some 975 kilometres southwest of the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

¤ An explosion wounded two people in Myanmar's capital as the military junta resumed constitutional talks dismissed by critics as a smokescreen to further entrench more than four decades of army rule. The cause of the blast inside a two-storey building in Yangon's Lanmadaw township was not clear, but the capital has been under tight security since three bomb attacks killed 11 people in May.