World highlights

• UN police in Kosovo fired teargas to disperse ethnic Albanians who smashed the windows of Parliament and stoned UN headquarters, angry at a delay to their demand for independence from Serbia. Thousands of protesters converged on the main symbols of authority in the capital, Pristina, throwing red paint on the buildings of the UN mission and Kosovo's interim government.

• Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has turned down a proposed UN role in the peace mission in Darfur, opposed a large increase of troops and asserted that the crisis there has been exaggerated. Mr Bashir repeated his hardline position against a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force to deploy in the troubled region of western Sudan, where aid agencies say 200,000 people have been killed since the conflict flared in early 2003.

• European powers have circulated a fresh draft UN Security Council resolution to China, Russia and the United States on sanctions against Iran over its refusal to stop enriching uranium, France said. Meanwhile Iran confirmed it would allow UN inspectors to take further environmental samples of research equipment linked to previous finds of highly enriched - or weapons-grade - uranium.

• A US forensics expert took the stand in Saddam Hussein's trial for genocide against ethnic Kurds yesterday to tell in grim detail how he unearthed the remains of 27 people from a mass grave in northern Iraq. Clyde Snow was the first such expert to testify in the trial, which prosecutors have previously said would rely heavily on forensic evidence to show how thousands of Kurds were killed during the Anfal - or Spoils of War - campaign in 1988.

• Central African Republic government troops, backed by French forces, have launched an offensive against rebels who had captured several northeastern towns, the government and the French military said yesterday.