World highlights

¤ Britain, Canada and the United States sought news of their citizens kidnapped in Iraq as a deadline for their execution passed without word. A little-known Islamist militant group called Swords of Truth has been holding four Western aid workers for more than two weeks and had threatened to kill them on Saturday unless thousands of prisoners were released from Iraqi jails.

¤ Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz joined Ariel Sharon's new Kadima faction, sowing further disarray in the ruling rightist Likud Party abandoned by the prime minister in the run-up to a March general election. Mr Mofaz is a popular figure among many Israelis for his tough handling of a five-year-old Palestinian uprising, although opinion polls had predicted he would lose a Likud leadership race on December 19 to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

¤ Chileans were voting in presidential and congressional elections that could propel a woman into the presidency for the first time and hand the center-left coalition a fourth term to lead Latin America's star economy. Front-runner Michelle Bachelet, a socialist who was tortured during the country's military dictatorship, was expected to continue the successful mix of free-market economics and leftist social reforms of popular President Ricardo Lagos, who cannot run again.

¤ An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.5 jolted an area off the north coast of Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific, seismologists said, prompting a warning of local tsunamis. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said there was no risk of a Pacific-wide tsunami but warned the undersea quake could generate localised destructive tsunamis.