• Iraq announced plans to close its borders with Iran and Syria and lengthen a night curfew on vehicles in new emergency measures to try to curb unrelenting violence in Baghdad. The measures were unveiled during another day of bloodshed in the capital in which a suicide bomber blew up a truck rigged with explosives near a Baghdad college, killing 18 people just a day after bomb blasts ripped apart two crowded city markets.
• Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his Hamas-led Cabinet will resign in the next two days to make way for a unity government with the rival Fatah faction, a government official said. Mr Haniyeh is expected to lead the new government, according to the terms of a deal agreed between Hamas and Fatah in Saudi Arabia last week which aimed to end factional warfare in Gaza and ease an economic embargo on the Palestinian Authority.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas he hoped economic sanctions against the Palestinian government would be lifted soon. Mr Putin met Mr Abbas in Jordan on the last leg of a Middle East tour of three US allies that demonstrated Russia's regional ambitions and its differences with US policies.
• Guinea's military enforced draconian martial law measures across the West African state, quashing protests and arresting curfew-breakers to halt a widening revolt against President Lansana Conte's rule. The US government said it would airlift some of its citizens out of the riot-torn West African state.
• South Africa, under pressure to redress land ownership imbalances left by apartheid, has expropriated its first farm in a reform drive aimed at returning land to the black majority, officials said. The state-ordered sale of a farm in the Northern Cape province marks a new phase in the contentious issue in South Africa, where the government has come under fire for moving too slowly to put land in black hands.
• Nigerian kidnappers have released all 24 Filipino seamen they had been holding captive in the creeks of the oil-producing Niger Delta since January 20, the men's employer, German shipping firm Baco-Liner, said.
• Republican Mitt Romney, a former governor who would be the first Mormon in the White House, launched his campaign with a call for "innovation and transformation" to rejuvenate the economy and restore faith in the government.
• Ecuador's leftist President Rafael Correa won a victory over rivals when Congress approved his request for a referendum on whether to rewrite the constitution. Opposition lawmakers had been hostile to the referendum plan but Mr Correa, a political outsider promising to curb the power of traditional parties in the poor Andean nation, finally won majority backing after several weeks of negotiations.