World Highlights

O Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh yesterday urged rival forces from his Hamas militant group and President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement to show restraint and vowed there would be no civil war. "I urge all our people to be calm and show more self-restraint," Mr Haniyeh told reporters after attending talks in Gaza between various factions aimed at defusing tensions.

O Iraqi member of al Qaeda confessed on Jordanian television yesterday to killing a Jordanian driver by shooting him in the head and to kidnapping two Moroccan embassy employees last year. Ziyad Khalaf Karbouli, described as a local head of al Qaeda network in the Iraqi town of Rutba near the border with Jordan, said he was responsible for last October's kidnapping of two Moroccans, who worked at their country's Baghdad embassy.

O President Alexander Lukashenko yesterday suggested that he might ban Western flights over Belarus in response to sanctions against his former Soviet state in connection with his disputed re-election. Mr Lukashenko issued his threat in his annual state of the nation address to Parliament in which he rejected any notion of a change in the policies denounced in the West and refused to consider any contact with his opponents.

O Former US Senator and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, who ran unsuccessfully for vice president in 1988, died yesterday at the age of 85, a family spokesman said. Mr Bentsen's tall stature and southern drawl gave him a gentlemanly air, but the Texas Democrat is perhaps best known for his verbal ferocity in denouncing his 1988 Republican opponent, Sen. Dan Quayle, as "no Jack Kennedy".

O The Sudanese government must agree to let a UN peacekeeping force into Darfur within weeks to make sure a peace agreement is applied, African Union commission chief Alpha Konare said yesterday. "In two months' time the rainy season starts. If confidence does not rule again to improve the security situation by then, it could be very bad," he told reporters after a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

O Heavy monsoon rains unleashed flash floods and mudslides in northern Thailand which killed at least 34 people, left dozens missing and thousands homeless, officials said yesterday. Unusually heavy rain at the start of the monsoon lashed deforested hills, causing flash floods - some of them three metres deep - which swept into cities and towns in four provinces, they said.

O Taliban guerillas attacked a convoy of provincial officials and police in southern Afghanistan and 11 Taliban and three policemen were killed, the government said yesterday. In a separate incident, four Afghan aid workers were killed in a roadside blast west of Kabul, police said.