World Highlights

• US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on a visit to Syria opposed by the White House, said she conveyed an Israeli message to President Bashar al-Assad that the Jewish state was ready to resume peace talks. Ms Pelosi, the most senior US official to visit Syria in more than two years, said President Assad told her he was also ready for negotiations with Israel. Syria wants the return of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

• Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian gunman at the Gaza border, a militant group said. An Israeli army spokesman said an Israeli force shot at three armed men, killing one of them and wounding at least one other, as they placed an explosive device 15 metres from the Gaza border fence.

• Gunmen killed 11 electricity plant workers in northern Iraq after stopping their vehicle and machine-gunning them as they sat inside, Iraqi police and army officials said. The violence comes as Iraqi and US military commanders warn that militants are shifting the focus of their attacks to outside Baghdad, where thousands of US and Iraqi troops have taken to the streets to crack down on sectarian bloodletting.

• Thousands of people left homeless by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in the Solomon Islands may not get help for another two days, the government warned, as rescuers struggled to reach remote villages. Some islands are still out of contact and dozens of villages unreachable by road after Monday's disaster in the South Pacific nation that killed at least 28 people.

• Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's government increased police patrols and stepped up a propaganda blitz to stifle a national strike over wages amid a devastating economic crisis. Many companies and shops in major cities were open again yesterday, the second and last day of a strike called by labour unions, as the government continued warning that organisers were "looking for trouble".