KAMPALA - U.S. President Bill Clinton, in Uganda on the second stop of his 12-day African tour, began a stretch of sensitive diplomacy coupled with a dollop of old-fashioned American assistance. Also, Clinton struggled to keep a messy sex scandal from intruding on his attempt to cast a statesman's image on a historic trip to Africa.
KAMPALA - Four Chinese construction workers and three Ugandans were shot dead in the Ugandan capital Kampala on Monday by a rogue policeman who later shot himself.
ROME - Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has not met key demands by major powers on Kosovo and pressure on him must be maintained, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said.
DUSHANBE - Six policemen were killed in Tajikistan when an armed band attacked their post.
BAGHDAD - A team of 19 senior diplomats arrived in Baghdad to prepare for weapons inspections of eight presidential sites at the centre of a crisis between Iraq and the United Nations last month.
NEW YORK - The scientist who pioneered Iraq's germ warfare programme has been arrested in Iraq while preparing to flee the country.
JERUSALEM - Israel said the United States knew the Israelis could not withdraw from more than another nine percent of the West Bank. A new American initiative was reported to be seeking a 13 percent pullback.
JAKARTA - Indonesia said it was sending a team of more than 1,000 firefighters to battle prolonged forest blazes in East Kalimantan on Borneo island.
PARIS - Far-rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen, for several days the kingmaker of French politics, was thwarted when the centre-right preferred to lose control of the key Paris region rather than deal with him.
LONDON - An Algerian court sentenced seven Moslem militants to death for killing a French Roman Catholic bishop and his driver in 1996. Five others were given prison sentences of two to three years by the court in Oran.
LONDON - Britain said it had placed all ports of entry on alert for Iraqi biological weapons after intelligence sources warned of a plot to smuggle lethal anthrax in bottles of perfume and alcohol.
PRISTINA, Serbia - Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has tackled a major grievance of the Kosovo region's restive ethnic Albanians with an agreement that promised them state education in their own language.
BELFAST - Northern Irish peace talks closed after eight hours with no sign of any narrowing of the gap between the chief protagonists.
GENEVA - United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson accused authorities in the former Zaire of obstructing the work of a U.N. team sent to look into alleged massacres of Hutu refugees from Rwanda.
NAIROBI - Kenya's main university was closed after rioting in which students shut down part of the capital.
NEW YORK - Bertelsmann AG, Europe's largest media company, agreed to buy Random House Inc., the largest book publisher in the United States, for an estimated $1.3 billion in its latest move into the competitive U.S. market.
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court let stand an appeals court ruling that struck down a state law banning "partial-birth" abortions, handing abortion rights advocates a victory and angering abortion foes.
JERUSALEM - The Israeli army said it had uncovered an Islamic militant ring responsible for attacks against Israelis.
