World highlights

• Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels said that peace talks with the government were impossible while the two sides remained locked in the worst fighting since a 2002 truce. The government had said it received a message from the Tigers through ceasefire monitors on Friday, hours before clashes erupted on the northern Jaffna peninsula, saying that they were keen to talk.

• UK Interior Minister John Reid warned that another attempted terrorist attack on Britain was "highly likely" after police said they had thwarted a plot to blow up transatlantic airliners. "We think we have the main suspects in this particular plot," Home Secretary Mr Reid said, "but there could be others out there, perhaps people we don't know."

• A Shi'ite leader has called for neighbourhood committees to provide security in their own districts, casting further doubt on the ability of Iraqi and US forces to reduce violence levels in Baghdad. Hadi al-Amiri, a member of Parliament and head of a Shi'ite militia, said the controversial committees were essential for security because Iraqi forces still lacked training and were not ready to tackle militants and insurgents.

• Typhoon Saomai has weakened to a tropical depression after leaving almost 300 dead or missing in China, sinking 1,000 fishing boats, flattening thousands of homes and causing losses of over $1 billion. Three days after the strongest typhoon to strike China in half a century barrelled into the coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, the official death toll had risen to 134 with at least 163 missing.

• Iran said Western threats and pressure would not resolve a dispute over its atomic programme but could push Tehran to review its nuclear policy. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi did not say what policy would be reviewed but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has previously said Iran might reconsider membership of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

• Alarmed by blasts in Mumbai, a terrorist plot in Britain and a US warning of a likely al Qaeda attack, India has raised security to its highest levels in years for this week's independence day anniversary.

• Uganda's military has killed a senior northern rebel wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, a spokesman said. Raska Lukwiya was one of five commanders from the elusive Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) named by the new world court in its first arrest warrants in October.