London

Kenyan police were last night questioning 12 people — all foreigners — as an international investigation was stepped up to identify the perpetrators of the first attack on Israeli targets attributed to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

One of Burundi’s main rebel groups agreed a ceasefire with the government yesterday after months of peace talks, raising hopes that a nine-year-long civil war which has left hundreds of thousands dead may be nearing an end.

The brains of Germany’s most notorious far-left urban guerrillas were taken away to be examined by scientists, secretly preserved in formaldehyde for a quarter of a century — and have now mostly vanished without trace.

Forty-five countries engaged in the diamond trade finally signed a new scheme to stem the flow of ”conflict” diamonds yesterday.

DUTCH far-right leader Pim Fortuyn, said to have been assassinated by a disgruntled animal rights activist, is to be buried in Italy.

British criminologists believe they can cut youth crime by increasing the content of fresh fruit and vegetables in the diet, following a study at a youth prison, details of which were published on Tuesday.

Indonesia has arrested the man they had named as the mastermind of last month’s Bali bombings which killed almost 200 people, the national police chief announced.

Environmental campaigners are to converge on Shell’s London headquarters this morning to highlight the company’s ”shocking” pollution record.

The US and the UN ignored warnings from a secret Taliban emissary weeks before September 11 last year that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge attack on America.

On the second day of the hunt for illicit weapons in Iraq, UN inspectors again found Iraqi officials well-prepared for their ”surprise” visits.

The Chinese Communist party opened its doors to all social classes yesterday in an attempt to become the party of the whole nation — while maintaining its monopoly on power.

The sale of an expensive British military air traffic control system to Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest countries, is to be condemned in a report by the World Bank.

The US government and the giant pharmaceutical companies are continuing to bully poor countries to tighten up their patent rules, hampering efforts to obtain cheap medicines for people with diseases such as HIV/Aids, according to a new report.

Plans for a two-tier system for drug pricing, which will supply cheap medicines to poor countries while they remain far more expensive for the rich, will be launched today by Clare Short in a bid to cut the vast numbers dying from Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.

Say what you like about Nelson Mandela, but he is not a man known to bear a grudge or lose his temper easily.

Sega, the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, expects profits to be squashed this year after the slow release of new titles and poor returns from the Tokyo stock market.

A Chinese woman with HIV has married her partner in a widely reported ceremony in Beijing which illustrates changing attitudes in China towards the country’s growing Aids crisis.

”I landed lying down on my back and reached for my camera — it felt amazingly heavy, like a huge 50lb lead dumbbell. It was incredible. Just putting one foot in front of the other required tremendous effort.”

Former family doctor Harold Shipman, sentenced to life imprisonment for 15 murders, in fact killed nearly 300 of his patients, according to an official inquiry whose results may be published this week, press reports said on Monday.

Indonesian state terrorism, backed by Britain, America and Australia, is to blame for the deadly Bali bombings, prominent Australian journalist John Pilger argued in an essay published on Wednesday.

The rains have come to the undulating pastures of northern Matabeleland. In the bread basket of Zimbabwe, the seed should be in the ground by now. But instead the rural poor are bracing themselves for a catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Matabeleland massacres a generation ago.

Forty-five of the 117 hostages killed during the Moscow hostage drama died from gunshot wounds, Interfax reported on Tuesday quoting the Moscow prosecutor.

The sunken oil tanker Prestige had begun to release some of its potentially lethal cargo of about 60 000 tons of fuel oil from the bottom of the Atlantic ocean yesterday, according to Portuguese officials.

The US government warned yesterday that it might take ”intrusive, interventionist measures” to deliver food aid directly to millions of famine-hit Zimbabweans if President Robert Mugabe continues to starve his political opponents.

The Kenyan sun had not long risen on the first day of the Israeli tourists’ holiday when they arrived at the hotel. Children and their parents mixed with couples on Hanukkah vacation at the Paradise Hotel’s reception.

In a year-long experiment called LaughLab, a British psychology professor asked thousands of people around the world to rate the humour value of a list of jokes. The online search has produced a winner.

This week’s public row between Australia and south-east Asia has thrown into sharp focus a truth that many in the region have realised for some time: after years of living as a peaceable power a new, more aggressive Australia is emerging.

More than 40 years after his death, the novelist Ernest Hemingway is playing a key part in the delicate relations between the country of his birth and his adopted home. The Cuban government is to work with American scholars and descendants of the man who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in a unique project to preserve the writer’s legacy.

A man wanted for questioning about a murder in which the victim’s body parts were found strewn around a housing project has fled to New York.

Three in 10 young people cannot find the Pacific ocean. Hint: it covers one third of the planet on a world map.