World Highlights

• Soldiers may have raped an Iraqi woman and murdered her and three members of her family, including a child, U.S. military officials said. One officer said the incident in March just south of Baghdad had initially been blamed on insurgents active in the area.

• Osama bin Laden praised the slain leader of Iraq's al Qaeda wing, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and vowed al Qaeda will continue to fight US forces and their allies "everywhere", according to an Internet audiotape.

• NASA's crucial decisions ahead of shuttle Discovery's planned lift-off today will begin at dawn, when managers must decide whether to fill the ship's fuel tank for launch, space agency officials said.

• The United States rejected Iranian calls for more time to study an offer of incentives to curb its nuclear fuel programme, insisting Tehran must respond by a G8 deadline next week. The Group of Eight industrialised nations told Iran they wanted a "clear and substantive response" on July 5 to an offer of incentives to stop enriching uranium.

• The Bush administration pledged yesterday to work closely with Congress to craft a system to try Guantanamo detainees but emphasised it had no plans to shut the prison for foreign terrorism suspects. "As we've said many times, you don't simply shut it down," White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters.

• A judge ordered the arrest of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria for a 1968 student massacre in a surprise move just two days before crucial elections. The arrest order for Echeverria, 84, came after two failed attempts in recent years to charge him with genocide.

• The risk of bird flu mutating into a form more easily spread between people is still high and there could be an increase in human infections at the end of the year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned.

• World Trade Organisation (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy, in his direst warning yet, said global trade talks were heading for a crisis but his words failed to stir negotiators into needed concessions.