World highlights

• Israeli troops killed two Palestinian militants in separate raids in the West Bank yesterday, Palestinian security officials and the Israeli army said.

• Iran has charged three US-Iranian citizens with spying, officials said yesterday, just a day after Washington and Tehran held their most high-profile talks in nearly 30 years.

• The Lebanese army launched artillery shells at a Palestinian refugee camp yesterday and militants barricaded inside fired mortars in the heaviest fighting there in a week.

• Fifty-six-year-old Umaru Yar'Adua took office as President of Nigeria yesterday, promising to tackle a catalogue of crises in Africa's most populous nation and conceding that his own election was "not perfect".

• China sentenced the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration to death for corruption, state media reported, in an unusually harsh sentence which could be reduced on appeal.

• France does not plan to stop the EU from opening new policy "chapters" in Turkey's accession talks next month despite President Nicolas Sarkozy's opposition to Turkish membership, an official said yesterday.

• The parents of abducted four-year-old Madeleine McCann released new video footage of their daughter taken before her disappearance in Portugal, before heading to Rome for a meeting with the Pope.

• A New Jersey jury yesterday found that Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG failed to adequately warn a patient of the bowel disease risks associated with its potent acne medicine Accutane and awarded him $2.5 million in damages.

• Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak won the first round of the Israeli Labour Party's leadership election and will face an ex-security chief in a run-off vote next month, official results showed.

• Serbia has arrested seven people suspected of the murder and torture of non-Serb civilians in the early months of Croatia's 1991-95 war for independence, Serb police said.