World highlights

¤ Pennsylvania's Amish began to bury the victims of this week's schoolroom massacre yesterday amid renewed concern that their private, rural way of life was yielding to modernity. The first funeral cortege of 37 horse-drawn carriages, driven by grim-faced, black-clad Amish, trotted through the main street of Georgetown. It was only a few miles from the school where a local, non-Amish milk-truck driver shot 10 girls aged six to 13 on Monday, killing five of them and then himself.

¤ Ten people, including seven policemen and two militants, were killed in a 26-hour gunbattle as security forces fought gunmen holed up in a hotel in the heart of Kashmir's main city, police said yesterday. At least 12 people were wounded, eight of them police officers, in the stand-off which began when a group of militants lobbed a grenade at a security camp and then entered a hotel opposite and began firing at the base on Wednesday.

¤ Sri Lanka's Air Force bombed Tamil Tiger bases for a third day yesterday, and suspected rebels clashed with government soldiers, after the foes agreed to crunch talks aimed at halting renewed civil war. Residents in the far northern army-held Jaffna peninsula heard volleys of artillery shells before dawn, but said the intensity was far lower than in recent weeks - the worst fighting since a 2002 ceasefire that now lies in tatters.

¤ Nigerian militants accused troops of razing a village in the oil-producing Niger Delta yesterday and threatened reprisals but a military spokesman denied an attack on the Elem-Tombia community had occurred. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said in an e-mail to media no one was killed in the army's attack on the village in Rivers state because the residents had fled.

¤ Centre-right leader Fredrik Reinfeldt, who has pledged to cut taxes and trim the welfare state, formally became Sweden's new Prime Minister yesterday after winning a vote in Parliament. Mr Reinfeldt polled 175 votes in his favour and 169 against in the 349-seat Parliament. His appointment had been expected after he led a four-party alliance to victory in September elections.

¤ Belgian police are holding an Iranian who claimed to be involved in a plot to bomb a passenger plane in Belgium but have found no evidence to corroborate his story, the federal prosecutor's office said. The man has been detained for over a week but his arrest was publicised only yesterday.