World highlights

¤ Industrialised and developing nations were close to a breakthrough on a deal to begin work on extending the Kyoto Protocol to fight global warming past 2012, but the United States resisted calls for new commitments to combat climate change.

¤ From the pulpits of mosques across Iraq at Friday prayers, clerics urged worshippers to cast their votes in next week's election, setting up a mass turnout in a ballot that has polarised the nation on sectarian lines.

¤ Croatian General Ante Gotovina, one of the three most wanted suspects from the Balkan wars, will leave a Madrid jail for The Hague war crimes court today, police and legal sources said.

¤ The US special envoy for human rights in North Korea called the state "a hidden world of hopelessness and terror" and said Pyongyang's treatment of its citizens was a global concern.

¤ The Red Cross is pushing the United States to give it access to prisoners held in secret jails as part of the US war on terror, it said.

¤ Israel has threatened to impose an "economic siege" on the Gaza Strip unless Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas disarms militant groups, Israel's Channel Two television said.

¤ Poland was the heart of the CIA's secret detention network in Europe until recently, an analyst of the US-based Human Rights Watch organisation was quoted as telling a Polish newspaper.

¤ Spanish police have arrested seven people suspected of funding an Algerian Islamist group linked to al Qaeda, Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said.

¤ Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, part of a team of lawyers defending Saddam Hussein against charges of crimes against humanity, accused witnesses in the trial of false testimony.