World highlights

¤ French leader Jacques Chirac has told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan he is sorry French lawmakers approved a bill making it a crime to deny Armenians were victims of genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks. "Chirac told me he was sorry and he thinks we are right... he will do what he can in the upcoming process," Mr Erdogan told his ruling AK Party, in broadcast comments.

¤ A 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck off Hawaii yesterday morning, with shaking and power outages felt as far as 240 km away on the island of Oahu, but no tsunami warnings were in effect.

¤ Two rocket-propelled grenades hit a building near the headquarters of the UN in Beirut, slightly wounding four people. Security forces said the grenades, fired from a small hill in central Beirut, hit a building that houses offices, a bank branch and a nightclub in Riad el-Solh some 30 metres from the UN offices.

¤ Efforts to arrange a long-awaited summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are deadlocked, a senior Israeli official said. "We offered Abu Mazen (Abbas) a meeting and he seemed uninterested," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "We are still offering, but he (Abbas) said it was conditional on (Israel) releasing (Palestinian) prisoners, and we will not free prisoners until Gilad Shalit is released."

¤ At least six people, including a member of the provincial assembly, were killed in separate attacks in Afghanistan, officials said. Violence this year has been the bloodiest in Afghanistan since US-led forces overthrew Taliban's government in 2001.

¤An 11-year-old Indonesian boy has died of bird flu, marking the country's 53rd death from the virus, an official at the Health Ministry's bird flu centre said. Ministry official Djoko said boy from South Jakarta died on Saturday night in a Jakarta hospital.

¤ Japan needs to discuss whether it should possess nuclear weapons in response to North Korea's claimed nuclear test, the ruling party's policy chief said. Shoichi Nakagawa, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Policy Research Council, said he believed Japan would adhere to its policy of not arming itself with nuclear weapons, but added that debate over whether to go nuclear was necessary.