World highlights

¤ Health experts meeting in Beijing tried to generate a $1.4 billion fund to fight bird flu as Indonesia said a toddler who died may be the latest victim of the virus.

¤ Interim Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he hoped to resume peace negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after Israel's March 28 general election.

¤ Nigerian militants who have sabotaged oil facilities and kidnapped workers in the southern Niger Delta threatened to stage a series of attacks over the next few days to show oil companies their power. World oil prices hit a three-and-a-half-month high after militants said they would broaden attacks on Nigeria's oil industry, threatening to cut deeper into supplies from the world's eighth biggest exporter.

¤ Iraq's president stepped into the debate over the future of the troubled court trying Saddam Hussein, suggesting it be moved from Baghdad to his own Kurdish home region to improve security.

¤ Last Friday's US air strike on a Pakistani border village, which US officials said was aimed at al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri, killed at least four foreign militants, a senior provincial official said.

¤ Ivory Coast's ruling party said it was abandoning a faltering UN peace process and hundreds of pro-government protesters called for the expulsion of UN troops and mediators whom they accused of meddling.

¤ The Bush administration cannot stop doctors from helping terminally ill patients end their lives under the nation's only physician-assisted suicide law, the US Supreme Court ruled.