World highlights

• A suicide bomber drove a minibus into a crowded market in Iraq's Shi'ite city of Kufa killing 16 people, officials said, in the latest in a string of sectarian attacks blamed on al Qaeda Sunni militants.

• Iran yesterday accepted a compromise for the agenda of a global meeting on how to fix the troubled nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, averting a collapse of the session after a week of deadlock. Tehran had blocked consensus for the programme over a phrase "reaffirming the need for full compliance" with the NPT, calling this a blank cheque for Western powers to bully it over its nuclear activity to the exclusion of other treaty issues.

• Afghanistan's government should hold direct talks with the resurgent Taliban and other opposition forces, the senate voted, in a bid to end the rising bloodshed in the country.

• Serbia's Parliament elected a hardline Nationalist as speaker, drawing condemnation from the European Union and stirring bitter memories of the rule of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

• Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have been negotiating through secret channels in addition to recent publicly known meetings, a newspaper reported. The Haaretz daily quoted unidentified Israeli Cabinet ministers and other politicians as saying Mr Olmert had given them the impression he expected "significant political progress", apparently through the secret talks, in the coming months.

• North and South Korean generals began rare talks that could make or break a historic and highly symbolic first run of trains across their heavily armed border in more than half a century.