MAPUTO - The death toll from a landslide in central Mozambique last week could reach 143.

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa's most notorious white assassin told the country's truth commission he had brutally tortured and killed a man identified as a former lover of President Nelson Mandela's ex-wife Winnie.

MORONI - Five people have died from cholera on the main Indian Ocean Comoros island and 60 people have been admitted to hospital.

LAGOS - Five more people have been killed in renewed clashes between two southwest Nigerian communities.

BEIJING - China said its poaching of one of Taiwan's last diplomatic allies, the Central Africa Republic, showed Taipei's efforts to raise its international profile had reached a dead end.

WASHINGTON - Former White House aide Linda Tripp, a central player in the sex scandal swirling around President Bill Clinton, said she was present when Monica Lewinsky received a late-night telephone call from the president.

BEIJING - A gas explosion killed 77 people and injured eight in a state-owned coal mine in northeast China.

TOKYO - Japan tapped a little-known lawmaker to take the helm at the embattled Ministry of Finance as fresh allegations emerged against the ministry, still reeling from a damaging bribery scandal.

MOSCOW - President Boris Yeltsin said he thought it would be necessary to change "one or two" members of his cabinet, but that Viktor Chernomyrdin should stay as prime minister.

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan - Frenchman L. Eyharts and two Russian cosmonauts orbited the Earth aboard their Soyuz spacecraft heading for the Mir space station after a perfect launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome.

GENEVA - The United Nations refugee agency confirmed that a French staff member had been kidnapped overnight in southern Russia by masked men and it appealed for his immediate release.

DAVOS, Switzerland - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said it was too early to say if Western strikes against Iraq were imminent, and Baghdad may yet back down in the current crisis.

MADRID - Russia's special envoy briefed Foreign Minister Primakov on his talks this week with Iraq's leadership aimed at defusing the crisis over international weapons inspections.

WASHINGTON - Microsoft Corp. asked an appellate court to throw out the case brought against it by the Justice Department.

COLOMBO - At least 14 people, including nine Tamil Tiger rebels, were killed in fresh fighting in Sri Lanka's north and east.

WASHINGTON - Monica Lewinsky, the woman at the center of the White House sex scandal, appeared to have reached a dead end on in her bid to gain immunity from prosecution.

LONDON - Britain has launched a fresh judicial probe into one of the most traumatic episodes in Northern Ireland's recent history, the killing of 14 unarmed Catholic demonstrators by soldiers 26 years ago.

WASHINGTON - The United States, Russia and 13 other nations signed an agreement to cooperate in building an international space station and hailed the event as marking the end of space-race rivalry.

PRAGUE - Czech caretaker Prime Minister Josef Tosovsky, fresh from winning a tough confidence vote in parliament, said he would lead the country to early elections in June and then quit politics as soon as possible.

NEW YORK - Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said in an interview that he expected his donations to society would exceed $1 billion during his lifetime.