World Highlights

• Somali government forces backed by Ethiopian troops, tanks and warplanes attacked Islamist fighters dug in for a last stand near a southern port town yesterday, witnesses said. "Fighting has started here. We are on the outskirts of Jilib," lawmaker Abdirashid Hidig told Reuters by phone.

• Belarus's top gas negotiator was in high-level talks in Moscow yesterday, raising hopes of a last-minute deal in a pricing dispute that threatens to disrupt Russian gas supplies to Europe from New Year's Day. Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom has said it will cut gas supplies to Belarus from 0700 GMT today if no deal is reached, while Minsk said it would retaliate by halting flows of Russian gas crossing the country bound for Western Europe.

• Indonesian rescuers have found nearly 180 survivors from a sunken ferry, but hundreds remain missing nearly two days after the vessel capsized in mountainous seas. There was hope of dozens more survivors after several life rafts were spotted out to sea with people in them.

• There has been "a breakthrough" in talks on freeing an Israeli soldier held captive by Palestinian militants in Gaza, the armed wing of the governing Hamas Islamist group said yesterday without giving details. Spokesman Abu Ubaida said Izz el-Deen al-Qassam and two other factions holding Corporal Gilad Shalit for more than six months were not yet ready to free him, but a deal could be close after what he described as a change in the Israeli position.

• Iran will never give up its nuclear programme and unfair treatment of the country over its atomic work will have consequences for the West and the Middle East, powerful cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said yesterday. The UN Security Council voted unanimously last week to impose sanctions on Iran's trade in sensitive nuclear materials and technology, in an attempt to stop uranium enrichment work that could produce material that could be used in bombs.

• Al Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri called on insurgents in Iraq to unite, and urged Palestinian Islamists not to cooperate with the Palestinian Authority, according to a Web audio tape posted yesterday. "O mujahideen brothers in Palestine... the traitor secularists cannot be your brothers, do not give them legitimacy or take part in their assemblies which are opposed to Islamic principles," said the speaker on the tape, who sounded like Zawahri.