World highlights

¤ Nasa said it would undertake a potentially risky shuttle mission to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope until at least 2013. Nasa Administrator Michael Griffin, speaking to cheering scientists who had feared Hubble's earlier demise, said a space shuttle would make one final maintenance trip, tentatively in 2008, to the orbiting telescope.

¤ Congolese authorities expressed concern about a stream of false reports on the results of Sunday's historic elections, saying they could spark more violence in this tense central African country. Western diplomats and the United Nations, which has its largest peacekeeping force in Democratic Republic of Congo, have repeatedly warned against a resurgence of violence between supporters of the two presidential candidates - incumbent Joseph Kabila and former rebel Jean-Pierre Bemba.

¤ Al Qaeda Number Two Ayman al-Zawahri was a past visitor to a madrasa destroyed by a Pakistan Army helicopter attack, but he was not there when the missiles struck on Monday, senior Pakistani security officials said. Several other al Qaeda luminaries had passed through the religious school run by pro-Taliban cleric Maulana Liaqatullah, who was killed in the airstrike along with around 80 of his followers, the officials told reporters a day after the attack.

¤ The European Commission will criticise Turkey on human rights and its failure to open its ports to shipping from Cyprus in a progress report on its EU candidacy to be published next week, EU sources said. But the survey to be unveiled by Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn on November 8 will say Ankara still has until the end of the year to let ships from Cyprus dock in its harbours and will not recommend any suspension of membership talks, they said.