World Highlights

¤ A strike shut down most of Toronto's public transport yesterday, filling the streets of Canada's biggest city with cars and forcing some 700,000 commuters to find different ways to get to work. Subway, bus and streetcar services were all out of service because of the wildcat strike, which centres on a dispute over working hours for maintenance workers. Commuters shared cars, struggled to find taxis or walked or biked to work.

¤ An explosion tore through a chemicals and explosives plant in Serbia yesterday, killing at least three workers at the complex 25 kilometres west of the Serbian capital, police said. Interior Minister Dragan Jocic said the blast occurred at 1.30 p.m. in the explosives factory of the Prva Iskra plant in Baric. Officials said the explosives factory had been completely destroyed but there was no danger of a chemical leak from the chemicals section of the plant.

¤ The European Union listed Sri Lanka's rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a banned terrorist organisation yesterday amid a sharp escalation in clashes between it and the military, EU diplomats said. "One of the consequences is the freezing of the (group's) assets," an envoy said of the decision taken at a regular meeting of EU ministers in Brussels.

¤ Militia fighters in Congo are holding hostage seven Nepali UN peacekeepers captured during a clash in the east in which a Nepali soldier was killed, UN and Congolese sources said yesterday. The UN mission in Democratic Republic of Congo said investigations were under way to try to discover the whereabouts of the peacekeepers, who were on an operation on Sunday in the vast central African country's violence-prone Ituri district.

¤ Seventy-five prisoners at the US naval base in Guantanamo were on a hunger strike yesterday, joining a few who have refused food and been force-fed since August, a military official said. Cmdr. Robert Durand, a spokesman for the Guantanamo detention operation, called the hunger strike an attempt by the prisoners to gain media attention and pressure the United States to release about 460 men held there as enemy combatants.