World Highlights

¤ A rare tornado wreaked havoc in the northern German city of Hamburg yesterday, tearing the roofs off houses, overturning cars and killing two people, authorities said. The southern district of Hamburg was hardest hit by the violent storm, which knocked down three cranes at a construction site, killing two operators, a police spokesman said.

¤ Liberia and Nigeria were at odds yesterday over who should take charge of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who is wanted by a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. While Nigeria had invited Liberian authorities on Saturday to take custody of the former warlord, who has lived in exile on Nigerian soil since 2003, Liberia's President said yesterday Mr Taylor should go to Sierra Leone.

¤ Nigerian militants freed three foreign oil workers yesterday after five weeks in captivity and said their fighters would now focus on crippling oil supplies from the world's eighth largest exporter. The three men, two Americans and one Briton, were handed to the governor of Nigeria's southern Delta state by an ethnic Ijaw leader who had been asked to negotiate with the militants.

¤ Belarussian courts yesterday jailed for up to 15 days more than 150 mostly young protesters detained when police broke up rallies against a presidential election judged unfair by the West. The EU, at loggerheads with Minsk over a poll it considers rigged, urged the protesters' release while a Polish diplomat was barred from entering Belarus.

¤ At least five people were killed when a helicopter with 11 people on board crashed in eastern Russia, officials said yesterday. Russia's Transport Ministry said in a statement that the Mi-8 helicopter crashed as it was descending to land in the Yakutia region of East Siberia.

¤ President George W. Bush, warned the US Congress against fearmongering yesterday as the Senate tackled immigration reform, an issue that has split his Republican party and spurred huge protests. With his job approval rating at the lowest of his presidency, Mr Bush faces a new test of his political strength on the divisive immigration issue.

¤ Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson picked UN heavyweight Jan Eliasson as Foreign Minister yesterday to replace Laila Freivalds seen as an embarrassment to a government facing an election in six months.

¤ Four Polish hikers out of contact since last week were safe after being stopped by Maoists in eastern Nepal and forced to spend a night in a remote village because they refused to pay a rebel "tax", one of the group said yesterday.

¤ A series of blasts killed one person and injured several others in Addis Ababa yesterday, the first fatality in a string of mysterious explosions in the Ethiopian capital. One person was killed and three others injured when the first blast ripped through a minibus in the southern part of the city.