• Amnesty International urged the US yesterday to abandon plans to try Guantanamo prisoners before military tribunals and asked other nations not to contribute any evidence for use at the trials. The London-based human rights group said the trials do not meet international standards of fairness and should be moved to the US federal courts.

• Nato-led forces killed 38 Taliban guerrillas in two separate attacks in southern Afghanistan yesterday, a provincial police official said. Backed by air support, the attacks targeted insurgent hideouts in two areas in Helmand province, the main drug producing region of Afghanistan, the world's leading producer of heroin, the district police chief said.

• The Somali government said yesterday that al Qaeda had made a young militant Islamist commander its leader in Mogadishu as fighting raged for a second day in the coastal capital. Deputy Defence Minister Salad Ali Jelle told a news conference Aden Hashi Ayro - an Afghanistan-trained commander in his 30s who runs the Islamists' feared Shabab, or military wing - was personally directing the growing insurgency.

• A senior Iraqi official said the government was holding talks with some major insurgent groups that might be nearing a point where a number would join a fight to drive al Qaeda out of Iraq. Saad Yousif al-Muttalibi, international affairs director at the National Dialogue and Reconciliation Ministry, said the talks were designed to persuade the groups to halt guerrilla warfare against the government and help defeat al Qaeda.