OUAGADOUGOU - Burkina Faso's government has agreed to set up an independent electoral commission, the opposition's key condition for contesting presidential elections.
NAIROBI - Workers in Kenya's capital Nairobi ignored a general strike call by the pro-reform National Convention Executive Council, although morning traffic remained light.
ROME - A powerful earthquake measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale shook Italy's central Umbria and Marche regions, a week after an equally strong quake hit the same area.
MOSCOW - Russia's Communist-led parliament accepted an olive branch from Boris Yeltsin and, with a bit of constitutional conjuring, put off Friday's confirmation debate on the president's youthful nominee for prime minister.
BAGHDAD - U.N. weapons inspectors and senior diplomats have ended their first round of inspections of Iraq's highly sensitive presidential sites and plan to leave Baghdad on Saturday.
JERUSALEM - Israel sent its secret service chief to tell Palestinian President Yasser Arafat that Israelis had no hand in the death of a Moslem militant master bomber.
CANBERRA - Australian Prime Minister John Howard dared a hostile upper house of parliament to pass his controversial Aboriginal land rights reform and test the bill in the courts, in a bold gambit to head off an early race-based general election.
JERUSALEM - The mother of an Israeli teenager who hacked into the Pentagon's computer system was quoted as saying her son was a high tech "Robin Hood".
NAIROBI - A senior Ethiopian diplomat has been shot dead in the Kenyan capital in the fifth killing of a foreigner since February.
WASHINGTON - As President Bill Clinton savoured the dismissal of the Paula Jones case, prosecutor Kenneth Starr pressed his investigation of the White House sex scandal by hauling Clinton's top aide before a grand jury.
BELGRADE - Serbia plans to hold a referendum on whether to allow international mediation in the Kosovo crisis, but not until a Western deadline for peace talks with ethnic Albanian separatists has expired.
DAKAR - U.S. President Bill Clinton ended a 12-day tour of Africa with an optimistic assessment of the continent's prospects -- and a promise.
ATLANTA - The widow of slain U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said she does not believe James Earl Ray killed her husband, and wants amnesty granted to anyone willing to reveal what they know about the 30-year-old case.
AMSTERDAM - A five-year-old Iraqi girl brought to the Netherlands for treatment last December died in an Amsterdam hospital on Thursday night of complications from a lymphatic disorder.
BEIRUT - A pro-Israeli militiaman was wounded when a roadside bomb planted by Hizbollah guerrillas went off near his position in south Lebanon.
ANKARA - An aide of Turkish PM Mesut Yilmaz said the government aimed for early polls in October, 1999.
ISTANBUL - A Turkish prosecutor has asked for a jail sentence of up to 15 years for a former interior minister accused of links with criminal gangs.
ANKARA - The death toll from a crash between a lorry and a bus carrying Iranian pilgrims in southern Turkey rose to 28 when a badly burned Iranian died in hospital.
