World highlights

¤ Pakistani security forces arrested three suspected militants, including a Tunisian believed to belong to al Qaeda, in the troubled tribal region of North Waziristan, a senior security official said yesterday. There was no immediate official comment from the government or the military.

¤ Heavy militia battles erupted in Mogadishu yesterday after a brief truce collapsed, bringing the death toll to almost 100 after four days of fighting in the Somali capital. At least 200 people have been wounded in the worst combat in Mogadishu for years.

¤ Northern Ireland's main Catholic republican party will nominate Protestant hardliner and staunch political opponent Ian Paisley to lead the province's local government, its President Gerry Adams said yesterday. The move to propose Mr Paisley, an outspoken critic of Catholic republicanism through decades of sectarian violence, follows a fresh bid by London and Dublin to revive the Belfast assembly and persuade Paisley to share power with nationalist rivals.

¤ Eight thousand doctors and nurses marched in Warsaw yesterday to protest against low pay in Poland's state-run health sector, escalating a conflict set to test the government's resolve to restrain pent-up wage demands. Health sector professionals demand an immediate 30 per cent pay increase and a more than 50 per cent rise in total spending on health care over the next three years, saying anything less will drive them to emigrate to richer Western Europe.

¤ Hundreds of thousands of Greek public sector workers staged a 24-hour strike opposing economic reforms yesterday, shutting down state services across the country including schools, hospitals and state-owned banks.

¤ A Spanish court sentenced two men to five years each in prison yesterday for their part in a 2002 suicide bombing in Tunisia which killed 21 people, 14 of them German tourists. An al Qaeda-linked group calling itself the Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Sites claimed responsibility for the bombing outside north Africa's oldest synagogue on the island of Djerba on April 11, 2002.