World highlights

¤ Three masked men shot and killed a Hamas leader as he left a mosque in the West Bank yesterday, witnesses said, a day after a rival Palestinian faction threatened to kill senior Hamas members. The shooting comes amid a growing power struggle between the ruling Hamas Islamist movement and the Fatah faction of President Mahmoud Abbas.

¤ At least 14 people were killed and 75 wounded in a car bomb attack on the convoy of Iraq's industry minister yesterday, Interior Ministry sources said. Minister Fawzi al-Hariri, a Kurd, was not in the convoy when it was attacked in central Baghdad, but two of his bodyguards were among those killed, said Industry Ministry spokesman Dhuha Mohammed.

¤ President Vladimir Putin warned Georgia yesterday not to provoke or blackmail Russia as Moscow tightened the screw on its southern neighbour. Discussing a dispute with Georgia over the arrests of four Russian officers, who were later released, Mr Putin told lawmakers: "I would not allow anyone to talk to Russia in the language of provocation and blackmail."

¤ Preliminary results from an early clinical trial of a vaccine for pandemic bird flu suggest the vaccine is safe and well tolerated and may prove effective against divergent strains of the disease, Baxter International Inc. said yesterday.

¤ American Roger Kornberg, the son of a Nobel laureate, won the 2006 Nobel prize for chemistry yesterday for describing gene copying in cells, which can give insight into illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Mr Kornberg's father, Arthur, took the prize for medicine in 1959, also for genetic work.