World highlights

¤ North Korea is making plans to test an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United States and the launch could come soon, US officials said. One official said there was some debate over the timing of a possible test but a second official said it could happen within the coming weeks.

¤ British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for the international community yesterday to push hard for a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace or risk seeing Israel pursue selective redeployment in the occupied West Bank. After talks with Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Mr Blair said the key was to press the new Palestinian Hamas government to renounce violence and accept coexistence with the Jewish state.

¤ Gunmen set fire to the Palestinian Prime Minister's office and parliament yesterday as clashes escalated between followers of the ruling Hamas militant group and President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement. In the latest sign of a deepening political crisis in the Palestinian territories, Abbas ordered security forces to take control of the streets in the wake of the fighting between rival gunmen from Fatah and Hamas.

¤ An Israeli train travelling from Tel Aviv to Haifa and carrying 200 passengers hit a stationary van in its path and derailed yesterday, killing at least five people and injuring dozens, rescue services said.The impact threw the locomotive on top of one carriage. Three others lay on their sides in a mass of twisted metal. Several passengers were trapped for two hours before rescuers stabilised their carriage and pulled them out.

¤ US forecasters warned that Tropical Storm Alberto could become the first hurricane of 2006 as it strengthened ominously over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and barreled toward northwest Florida. The storm was about 300 kilometres south-southwest of Apalachicola, in Florida's panhandle, at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), according to the US National Hurricane Centre.