World Highlights

¤ Influential Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said he rejects the Iraqi constitution backed by his partners in the biggest parliamentary bloc, threatening to re-ignite one of the country's most explosive issues.

"I reject this constitution which calls for sectarianism and there is nothing good in this constitution at all," he told Al Jazeera television late on Saturday.

¤ Philippine villagers began to bury their dead in a mass grave as rescuers pulled only corpses from an entombed community of 1,800 crushed under metres of mud by a landslide.

"They are being buried as we speak, 50 of them, all in the one grave," Rosette Lerias, governor of Southern Leyte province in the central Philippines, told Reuters.

¤ Nigerian militants who have kidnapped nine foreign oil workers and forced a sharp cutback in the country's oil exports threatened to blow up oil tankers.

"We are not just going to fire rockets. We intend to destroy any export tanker we are able to reach," the militants said in an email to Reuters.

¤ Nepal's King Gyanendra made his first formal approach to the country's estranged political parties, urging them to join talks and try to put democracy back on track.

Piling pressure on the unpopular monarch who seized power last year, more than 3,000 people marched in the capital demanding a return to democracy.

¤ Ten out of a total of 12 crew members died when two US Marine Corps helicopters crashed off the coast of Djibouti on Friday, the US military in the Horn of Africa country said.

Eight of them were Marines and two were Air Force airmen, a statement said. The small Red Sea state of Djibouti is a hub of US counter-terrorism operations in the region.

¤ Sixty-six people were trapped underground in a coal mine in a remote, semi-desert region of northern Mexico yesterday after an explosion that injured seven others, rescue workers said.

Civil protection staff were working to free those trapped in the mine, located in the northern part of state Coahuila, which borders Texas in the United States.