World Highlights

¤ The Hamas-led Palestinian government ordered its new militia off Gaza's streets yesterday after clashes with President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement that stirred fears of civil war. In Ramallah and Gaza, top Hamas officials appeared close to rejecting an ultimatum from Mr Abbas to back a proposal calling for Palestinian statehood that implicitly recognises Israel.

¤ The US Senate confirmed Gen. Michael Hayden yesterday as the next CIA director, with the Bush administration hoping he will help reinvigorate an agency battered by a string of intelligence failures. Gen. Hayden, 61, takes over America's most storied spy agency with a pledge to boost morale and make it more aggressive after it was caught flat-footed on the September 11, 2001 attacks and provided flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

¤ Sudan has yet to decide whether to allow UN peacekeeping troops into Darfur, but will let a technical team visit the region to investigate a United Nations role, presidential adviser Mustafa Osman Ismail said yesterday.

¤ A senior Islamic Jihad official and his brother were killed in southern Lebanon yesterday in a car bombing the Palestinian group blamed on Israel. An Israeli military source said he was unaware of any involvement by the Jewish state in the attack on Mahmoud Majzoub, known as Abu Hamze, and his brother Nidal, also an Islamic Jihad member, in the port city of Sidon.

¤ Tens of thousands of people marched silently through Antwerp yesterday to protest against racial violence after the murder of an African woman and a white toddler in her charge. They were killed two weeks ago by an 18-year-old Belgian who went on a shooting spree on a shopping street. He also wounded a Turkish woman.

¤ Chickens are dying in unusually large numbers in a remote area in Indonesia where avian flu killed several members of a family, and experts say the first victim in the cluster was probably infected by a diseased bird. Health experts have been trying to find the source that introduced the H5N1 virus to the family in Kubu Sembilang village in north Sumatra, killing as many as seven of them.

¤ A French military helicopter crashed while on a reconaissance mission in the Ivory Coast, killing one of its crew and seriously injuring a second, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday.