World Highlights

¤ Sudan's army has committed the first serious violation of a final ceasefire signed a year ago to end Africa's longest civil war in its south, a UN peacekeeping official said yesterday. The former southern rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) said the army sent around 1,200 troops last week into the rebel-controlled eastern area of Hamesh Koreb and has threatened to expel the SPLM. A joint UN-led team is still in the area to defuse tensions between the two sides.

¤ Russia has invited former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to come for medical treatment, the Foreign Ministry said yesterday. Mr Milosevic, who is suffering from a heart condition and high blood pressure, has asked for a provisional release from detention in the Netherlands where he is being tried by the war crimes tribunal on genocide charges. The prosecution has opposed the request, saying Mr Milosevic would not return from Russia, but spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said the foreign ministry was prepared to guarantee that he would go back to the tribunal after his treatment.

¤ Five prominent Syrian opposition figures, whose freedom had been demanded by the US, were released from prison yesterday, a human rights activist said. Anwar al-Bunni said Riad Seif and Maamoun al-Homsi, both former deputies, as well as Walid al-Bunni, Habib Issa and Fawaz Tello, were freed after a court cut their jail terms by seven months. The five men were sentenced to five years in prison in 2002 for violating the Constitution but activists said they were targeted because of their calls for reform.

¤ Russia yesterday reduced gas supplies to Europe and trimmed back its oil output because of extreme cold at home, and weather forecasters warned of another deep freeze next week. Domestic energy supplies were stretched to the limit because Russia - though no stranger to wintry weather - was shivering in a cold snap of the sort meteorologists said normally happens only once in a generation.