World Highlights

¤ German Chancellor Angela Merkel raised divisive issues of Iran and human rights at meetings in Beijing yesterday after her trip got off to a relaxed start strolling in the park with Premier Wen Jiabao. In her first visit to China as chancellor, Ms Merkel is also expected to witness a series of deals between the two countries, whose bilateral trade reached $63.2 billion last year, making Germany China's largest trading partner in the EU.

¤ A new Hamas militia battled gunmen from a Fatah-dominated security force near the Palestinian Parliament in Gaza yesterday in fresh clashes that killed a Jordanian driver and wounded six bystanders.

¤ Health officials in Indonesia are still struggling to track down the source of a worrying family cluster of H5N1 bird flu infections as tests showed that two more people have died of the same disease. Meanwhile, tests on the bodies of two Iranians showed they had the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu.

¤ Spanish police arrested 26 people and seized over 15 tonnes of marijuana when they smashed a drug smuggling ring on Spain's south coast, officials said yesterday. Police seized guns, 17 vehicles and one million euros cash in one of the biggest drug busts on Spain's Costa del Sol - dubbed the "Costa del Crime" by British tabloids for its reputation as a hot spot for organised crime.

¤ Suspected Islamist rebels launched four grenade attacks in Indian Kashmir's main city yesterday as political separatists spurned an invitation for talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. One person was killed and 24 injured, a modest toll by Kashmir's standards of daily violence, but the number of attacks was unusually high.

¤ The US Supreme Court yesterday declined to decide whether a chemical cocktail used to execute convicted murderers violates the US Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, clearing the way for the practice to continue. The justices refused to hear the appeal by a Tennessee death row inmate who said one of the drugs may inflict inhumane pain and that 30 states, including his own, have banned using it for the euthanasia of animals.