World highlights

¤ Spain's Catalonia region voted overwhelmingly in favour of a statute giving it more autonomy yesterday, but low turnout in the ballot immediately sparked questions about its validity. According to official data, with 98.5 per cent of the votes counted, 73.9 per cent of Catalans said "yes" to a fiercely contested statute that has fired debate on autonomy in Spain's regions and reawakened sensitivities that date back to the Civil War of the 1930s.

¤ Two cars collided on a main road in northwestern England yesterday, killing six people, police said. All five people in one of the cars - a 19-year-old man, a 21-year-old woman, two teenage girls and a baby - were killed in the crash on the A6 road north of Penrith, a police spokesman said. An elderly man driving the other car died. An elderly woman who was also in that car was taken to a Carlisle hospital and her condition was very poor, the spokesman said.

¤ Somalia's interim government yesterday accused Islamists who have become a major threat to its limited authority of lying about an Ethiopian troop incursion as a pretext to attack its headquarters. The Islamist militias, who have rapidly seized a strategic swathe of Somalia and flanked the government's temporary base in Baidoa, said on Saturday 300 Ethiopian troops had crossed into the country.

¤ Up to 2,000 people joined a demonstration in east London yesterday to protest over the June 2 Forest Gate anti-terrorism raid which resulted in an innocent man being shot. The demonstrators, including one of the brothers arrested during the dawn raid, called for a full apology from the police and sought reassurances the Muslim community would not be wrongly targeted again.

¤ At least 18 passengers were killed and 23 others injured when a bus skidded off a mountain road and plunged into a river in Indian Kashmir yesterday, police said. The accident took place near Ramban, about 80 km north of Jammu, winter capital of the revolt-torn state.

¤ Suspected Tamil Tiger rebel attacks killed three policemen and left two soldiers missing yesterday, the army said, and rebels said they were attacked by government forces as a recent upsurge of violence continued.

¤ Four Afghan schoolchildren died and 15 were injured in a stampede yesterday after a fire broke out in the kitchen of their building, police said. The incident occurred in a three-storey primary school in the western city of Herat, provincial police chief Mohammad Ayoub Salangi said.