World Highlights

¤ Shi'ite in-fighting over who should head Iraq's vital oil ministry is delaying efforts by the prime minister-designate to form a unity government aimed at averting a slide towards civil war, officials said.

Though Nuri al-Maliki has 10 more days to form a broad-based coalition Washington hopes will foster stability and allow it to start withdrawing troops, wrangling has thwarted the no-nonsense Shi'ite Islamist's plans to announce a cabinet by this week.

¤ The death toll in Somalia's worst fighting for a decade rose to more than 120, as militias battled for control of the capital with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft guns.

Hundreds of people were wounded as shells crashed into their homes in Mogadishu's overcrowded northern shanty town of Siisii. Many more fled to escape the fighting, which spread to neighbouring heavily populated areas yesterday.

¤ The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said he would ask US phone companies whether they are providing phone records of tens of millions of Americans to the National Security Agency.

Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, was reacting to a report in USA Today saying the NSA was secretly collecting the records and using the data to analyse calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.

¤ Indian communists swept to power in two of five state assembly elections while the chief of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, easily won a parliamentary by-election.

Congress did not have much else to cheer about in the mammoth state polls, its biggest electoral test since coming to power two years ago.

¤ Three foreign oil workers, including an Italian, were kidnapped from a car under armed escort in Nigeria's oil capital Port Harcourt a day after a US oil executive was shot dead in the same city.

Police and industry sources said the abduction of the employees of Italian oil contractor Saipem was sparked by a dispute between the company and the community where it is working and that efforts were under way to secure their release.