World highlights

• The United States and North Korea held "lengthy and substantive" talks, offering a glimmer of hope that six-party negotiations aimed at dismantling the North's nuclear programmes may yield progress. North Korea opened the talks by presenting sweeping demands in return for scrapping its nuclear weapons, starting with the lifting of US financial curbs and UN sanctions.

• Radical action is needed to save a "hollowed-out and fatally weakened" Iraqi state and ease violence that a Pentagon report says is at an all-time high, a prominent think-tank said. The report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said an international effort was needed to prevent Iraq collapsing into a "failed and fragmented state" whose Shi'ite- Sunni Arab conflict could draw in its neighbours in a proxy war.

• Russia's state security chief stepped up Moscow's pressure on international non-governmental organisations and charities, saying they were increasingly being used as cover for foreign spying operations. President Vladimir Putin has already accused foreign powers of using NGOs for political ends, and this year signed a law on NGOs that activists say could be used to harass charities.

• Nearly 40 people were killed in clashes between Chad's security forces and armed raiders who attacked two eastern villages, burning homes and mutilating their victims, the government said. Communications Minister Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor said the villages of Aradibe and Habile were attacked at the weekend by "Janjaweed", the term usually used to designate Arab militia raiders who operate from Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region.

• Guns were silent in the sole stronghold of Somalia's interim government as an Islamist deadline to Ethiopian troops to leave or face holy war passed with conciliatory signs. Around the dusty agricultural trading post where Somalia's shaky government conducts business from a converted warehouse, residents reported calm despite the threat by the country's Islamist movement.

• UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a farewell news conference, urged the Security Council to push for a negotiated end to the Iranian nuclear crisis, saying military action would be a disaster. "I believe that the council, which is discussing the issue, will proceed cautiously and try to do whatever it can to get a negotiated settlement for the sake of the region and the world," Mr Annan said.