World highlights

• At least seven children were killed in a US-led coalition air strike on a religious school in Afghanistan, the coalition said, amid rising anger over civilian deaths from foreign military operations. A US military spokesman said some children who survived Sunday's raid said insurgents had forced pupils to stay inside the madrasa.

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy was forced into a cabinet rethink after losing a senior minister in a parliamentary election that gave him an unexpectedly small majority, but his reforms remained on track. Centre-right allies tried to mask their disappointment at Sunday's vote, which saw them miss out on a widely predicted landslide following a week of poorly managed debate over a possible hike in value-added tax.

• North Korea plans to seal its nuclear reactor, the source of weapons-grade plutonium, in the second half of July, Russia's Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified North Korean diplomatic source as saying. Despite more than two months of delay in beginning the dismantling of the North's atom bomb programme, it would still be possible to complete the nuclear disarmament of the communist state by the end of the year, the chief US nuclear envoy said.

• Conrad Black and his associates systematically stole $60 million from the publishing empire they once ran and then tried to hide what they did, prosecutors told jurors in final arguments at the former media baron's criminal fraud trial. "We are not here because somebody made mistakes. We are not here because somebody didn't disclose something in a timely fashion," prosecutor Julie Ruder told the 12 women and four men as the trial entered its 14th week.