Sars suspects are being victimised in Beijing, where thousands have now been put in compulsory quarantine, a World Health Organisation specialist, Dr Wolfgang Preiser, said yesterday.

South Korea and Japan expressed disbelief and dismay yesterday at the news that their paranoid, impoverished and belligerent neighbour North Korea had declared itself the latest member of the nuclear weapons club.

The US is preparing to install an American chairman on a planned management team of the Iraqi oil industry, providing further ammunition to critics who have questioned the Bush administration’s agenda in the Middle East.

The Bush administration is preparing a draft security council resolution that would reduce the United Nations to a marginal role advising the US on running Iraq until the creation of a new government, diplomats and administration officials said yesterday.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing growing pressure from ministers and backbench Labour MPs to intensify Britain’s efforts to isolate Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe while African leaders strive to do the opposite, arguing that engagement would be more effective.

Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo on Friday accused the European Union poll monitors who criticised the conduct of his re-election of not understanding African culture.

Police in the Zimbabwe capital Harare on Friday arrested around 30 people, most of them opposition supporters, on the third day of a nationwide strike against fuel prices.

United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix condemned the efforts of British and United States intelligence before the war to show that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and insisted that, without UN verification, their post-war inspections lacked credibility.