DAKAR - At least 5,000 villagers have been displaced by separatist violence in Senegal's Casamance province and are sheltering in the main town of Ziguinchor.

LISBON - The former Angolan rebel movement UNITA wants the United Nations to extend a deadline for the imposition of sanctions to ensure it has time to comply fully with 1994 peace accords, a spokesman said.

HONG KONG - IMF head Michel Camdessus said that despite a good outlook there were hurdles to "high-quality growth", including malfunctioning labour markets in Europe and fragile banking systems, including in parts of Asia and Latin America. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said that Japan's rising current account surplus was still worrying and that markets remained concerned about Japan's ability to boost domestic demand.

JERUSALEM - Israel's state-run Channel One Television said that the Jewish state had exact information on the identity of the attackers in two Jerusalem bombings that have killed 20 Israelis since July. It said they apparently took orders from the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas.

KUCHING, Malaysia - Smog choking Southeast Asia thickened dangerously in Malaysia's Borneo state of Sarawak, cutting visibility in the capital Kuching to an arm's length.

MOSCOW - The crew of Russia's troubled Mir space station has fully restored the main computer and restarted its gyroscopic steering devices, Mission Control said.

SEOUL - North Korea's powerful military has thrown its weight behind a long-delayed drive to elect its supreme commander Kim Jong-il as the head of the ruling communist party.

WELLINGTON - New Zealand submitted the largest ever offer of reparations to native Maori, covering grievances that date back 150 years.

UNITED NATIONS - On a day of diplomacy at the United Nations, Bill Clinton opened a bid to gain Senate ratification of a global treaty outlawing nuclear test explosions.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif offered to open talks on a non--aggression pact with arch-rival India in what he said was a bid to end a bitter dispute over Kashmir.

BELGRADE - Slobodan Milosevic's leftist bloc led in Serbia's presidential and parliamentary elections but faced an unsavoury choice of a coalition partner to secure power for another four years.

UNITED NATIONS - Russia told the United States it would not oppose Bosnian Serb parliamentary elections called for next month by President Bijana Plavsic.

BELFAST - Britain said that Northern Ireland's bitter foes, Protestant unionists and Catholic republicans, are likely to face one another at last in landmark talks.

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia - Around 65 police were locked in a stand-off outside the Bosnian Serb town of Prnjavor after officers loyal to indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic tried to regain control of the police station there.

HONG KONG - Thirty-two workers were killed and four injured after a fire raged through a shoe factory in China's southern Fujian province.

JERUSALEM - Czech President Vaclav Havel arrived in Israel and appealed for peace as he toured the open air Jerusalem mall where three suicide bombers killed five Israelis earlier in the month.

CAIRO - Egypt will put on trial within weeks six journalists from the opposition Shaab newspaper on charges of libelling the interior minister and insulting the police.

MOSCOW - Russian President Boris Yeltsin will turn to foreign policy issues, meeting separately two visiting leaders, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

MORONI - Secessionists on the Indian Ocean island of Anjouan said they had mined a beach and deployed heavy guns along the north coast facing the main Grande Comore island in preparation for an attack by Comoran government forces.

CAPE TOWN - A Moslem doctor and a month-old baby died and several people were severely hurt when a simmering war between Cape Town's gangsters and their Moslem foes erupted in renewed clashes.