World highlights

• Nigerian gunmen kidnapped six Russians and shot dead a local driver in a dawn attack on a residential compound of the world's top aluminium producer in the southeastern town of Ikot Abasi, authorities said yesterday.

• Iran's President yesterday said the Lebanese and the Palestinians had pressed a "countdown button" to bring an end to Israel.

• Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel's attacks against militants in the Gaza Strip had led to a drop in rocket strikes from the territory and they would continue.

• Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi was berated by angry voters yesterday who want him to stop the United States expanding an air base near their homes.

• Turkish forces shelled a mountain stronghold of Turkish Kurd rebels in northern Iraq yesterday, a day after Iraq's Prime Minister urged Turkey to use diplomacy to defuse rising tensions in the region.

• A third UN sanctions resolution and efforts by the US to isolate Iran will not deter the Islamic Republic from pursuing its nuclear programme, a Foreign Ministry official said yesterday.

• Somali hijackers seized a Danish cargo ship and its five Danish crew in the latest case of piracy plaguing waters off the lawless Horn of Africa nation, a Kenyan maritime official said yesterday.

• US Defence Secretary Robert Gates arrived in Afghanistan yesterday and said security and development were improving despite rising Taliban violence, but he was concerned about preserving those gains.

• Voters stayed away in large numbers from Senegal's parliamentary elections yesterday as the main opposition parties boycotted the ballot to protest against what they called President Abdoulaye Wade's "monarchy".

• A bomb wounded 17 teenagers in Thailand's rebellious Muslim south as they played football yesterday, officials said. The bomb exploded at a sports field in a village in Yala, one of three southern provinces where more than 2,100 people have been killed in a three-year-old separatist insurgency.