World highlights

• Mexicans voted for a new President yesterday, torn between joining a resurgent left-wing camp in Latin America or sticking to pro-business policies and a close alliance with the US. In a country crucial to US interests in border security, trade and immigration, polls showed an extremely close race between leftist anti-poverty crusader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, and conservative Felipe Calderon from the ruling party

• Bolivians elected a national assembly yesterday to rewrite the Constitution, a project President Evo Morales says will cement his leftist reforms and empower the poor, indigenous majority. Constitutional reform was a key election promise of coca farmer Morales, who took office as the South American country's first indigenous President in January vowing to end 500 years of domination by a white elite.

• Somalia's powerful Islamist movement yesterday distanced itself from Osama bin Laden's view that any deployment of foreign troops to the Horn of Africa country would be part of a crusade to crush Islamic rule. "Osama bin Laden is expressing his views like any other international figure. We are not concerned about it," Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the moderate former leader of the Islamist group, told reporters in the capital Mogadishu.

• Two people were killed and nearly 200 injured in clashes in Bangladesh yesterday as opposition parties enforced a countrywide transport shutdown, police and witnesses said. A policeman was killed after being pelted with stones and hit by stick-wielding activists in Sonargaon, 30 km from Dhaka.

• Kuwait's ruler yesterday reappointed his nephew as Prime Minister of the Gulf Arab oil producer and asked him to form a new Cabinet following last week's parliamentary polls. State news agency Kuna said Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah asked Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah to submit a list of ministers for the new cabinet for approval.

• UN Secretary General Kofi Annan yesterday failed to persuade Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir to allow a UN force into Darfur, but said he still expected it to be deployed eventually. Mr Annan met Mr Bashir on the fringes of an African Union summit where he called the Darfur crisis "one of the worst nightmares in recent history". He has previously described Mr Bashir's opposition to the UN force as "incomprehensible".