World Highlights

¤ More than 450 African migrants packed into precarious longboats landed on the Canaries over the weekend as the Spanish islands faced a fresh wave of illegal immigration from West Africa, media reports said yesterday.

¤ An Italian soldier seriously wounded by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq last month has died, Italian news agencies said yesterday. Four other soldiers - three Italians and a Romanian - were killed on the spot or died shortly after the bomb exploded on April 27, ripping through their convoy. The attack took place on a road southwest of Nassiriya, the city where Italian soldiers in Iraq are based.

¤ Two Australian miners trapped underground for 12 days will not be rescued at least until today because they are surrounded by rock five times as hard as concrete and extremely difficult to hack through, officials said. Rescuers had hoped to use hand picks and small drills to dig a one-metre wide rescue tunnel to the two miners, but made little progress through the hard rock entrapping the men. They now plan to use low impact explosives to try to break through.

¤ US lawmakers, some from President George W. Bush's Republican party, are challenging his expected choice as CIA chief of a general behind a disputed domestic spying programme. They voiced reservations on Sunday talk shows about Mr Bush's potential choice of Gen. Michael Hayden, deputy to national intelligence director John Negroponte, to head the spy agency following Porter Goss's resignation under pressure on Friday.

¤ US President George W. Bush yesterday said he would like to close the US-run prison at Guantanamo Bay - a step urged by several US allies - but was awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on how suspects held there might be tried.

¤ Special units with helicopters and masked police marksmen carried out high-profile raids in Serbia yesterday on possible hideouts of war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, state television reported. No results were reported.

¤ An earthquake of magnitude 5.2 struck Iran's southeastern province of Kerman yesterday and 14 out of scores injured were taken to hospital, a government official said. The official, who declined to be named, said that apart from those treated in hospital 65 had received light injuries in the quake.