World Highlights

¤ Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, whose country abandoned weapons of mass destruction programmes in 2003, said that at one stage Libya had come close to building a nuclear bomb. It was the first time any Libyan official has confirmed that the north African country of more than five million had been trying to build a nuclear bomb.

The main point of Gaddafi's speech was to say that he wanted to limit the role of foreigners in the economy to ensure as much of the country's wealth as possible stayed at home.

¤ Thousands more people fleeing Israel's aerial bombardment of Lebanon flooded into Cyprus and Turkey amid signs the mass evacuation may finally be levelling off.

Cypriot police spokesman Demetris Demetriou told Reuters the total number of evacuees arriving in the holiday island had reached 35,000 by yesterday morning. Of those, 23,000 had already travelled home.

¤ President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will consider adding more US and Iraqi troops in Baghdad and other ways to counter surging violence when they meet at the White House today.

Mr Bush and Mr Maliki will consider new approaches to quelling the bloodshed in and around the capital after Mr Maliki's security plan for the region proved a disastrous failure.

¤ The chief judge in Saddam Hussein's trial accused the ousted Iraqi leader's half-brother of having blood on his hands from an early age.

"Enough blood. Your hands have been saturated with blood since your childhood," Raouf Abdel Rahman told Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam's former intelligence chief.

¤ Two suicide bombers targeted Afghan and US-led coalition troops in Afghanistan, amid a wave of such attacks before Nato takes over security in the country's violent south.

Two coalition troops and one Afghan army soldier were wounded. The identities of the foreign troops were not given.

¤ Pakistan is building a reactor that could produce enough plutonium for 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year in what would be a major expansion of its nuclear programme and an intensified arms race in South Asia, a report said. Satellite photos show what appears to be the construction site for a larger nuclear reactor adjacent to Pakistan's only plutonium production reactor, according to an analysis by nuclear experts at the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

¤ Kosovo formally made its pitch for independence face-to-face with Serbia at their first top-level talks on the issue since Nato bombs drove out Serb forces in 1999.

The one-day meeting in Vienna placed the Albanian majority's demand for independence on the agenda of a UN-led mediation process that began in February, seven years since the West intervened to halt a wave of ethnic cleansing and the UN took control.