World highlights

• Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinian gunmen and a police officer and kept up missile strikes against militant targets in the northern Gaza Strip, residents and medical officials said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel's assault on rocket-launching squads and gunmen would not be open-ended but declined to say when it would finish. He appeared to acknowledge the rocket threat could not be wiped out by the operation.

• Turkey offered to amend a law sharply criticised by the European Union in an effort to avert a crisis in relations, but it signalled no change of tack over Cyprus, the biggest threat to its EU ambitions. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's olive branch to the EU came three days before the European Commission, in its annual progress report, is expected to complain of a serious slowdown in Turkish reforms since the accession talks began a year ago.

• Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian denied wrongdoing in his first public remarks since a government prosecutor accused him of corruption in the biggest political crisis of his six years in office. Opposition politicians expressed disbelief and said they would keep up the pressure on Chen to step down.

• Spurred by a UN warning that Africa risks catastrophic damage from global warming, UN talks in Nairobi will seek to ease deep rifts over how to widen a fight against climate change beyond 2012.