HARARE - Former Zimbabwe state president Canaan Banana goes on trial on Monday to face 11 charges of sodomy, attempted sodomy and indecent assault.
Zimbabwe is planning to sell 77 tonnes of elephant hides, a year after it was exempted from a world ban on the ivory trade on the grounds that its elephant population is thriving.
BEIRUT - French President Jacques Chirac dismissed chances of any separate Israeli peace with Lebanon, saying the Jewish state must simultaneously settle Syria`s demand for return of the Golan Heights.
TRIPOLI, Lebanon - Lebanese voted in the second round of the first municipal elections for 35 years hoping for a new political landscape in a country dominated by three leaders.
NAIROBI - The United Nations, the United States and other world powers must do more to help end civil war and famine threatening 700,000 people in southern Sudan.
GEORGE, South Africa - Hardline former South African state president P.W. Botha returns on Monday to the small town court where he is defending his refusal to appear before a post-apartheid probe into past human rights abuses.
ABU DHABI - Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said an Arab summit was needed to coordinate stands before a proposed international conference on Middle East peacemaking.
JERUSALEM - Ultra-Orthodox Jews scuffled with Palestinians outside Jerusalem`s Old City at the close of morning prayers for the Jewish holiday Shavuot.
NIAMEY - Members of Niger`s Republican Guard have ended a mutiny over back pay and freed a senior officer they took hostage, President Ibrahim Bare Mainassara`s personal chief of staff said.
MORONI - The new government of the Indian Ocean Comoro Islands, named by President Mohamed Taki on Saturday, held its first meeting on Sunday but was immediately denounced by leaders of the secession movement on Anjouan island.
TEHRAN - Iran`s conservative speaker of parliament Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri was reelected for a new one-year term, defeating a moderate opponent.
ALGIERS - Attackers stopped an ambulance at a fake roadblock south of Algiers and killed its three occupants, slashing the driver`s throat and shooting dead the nurse and a sick man.
WASHINGTON - World powers showed rare unity in denouncing Pakistan`s underground nuclear tests two weeks after India staged similar blasts, and called on South Asia`s arch-rivals not to carry out any more.
BEIJING - Chinese President Jiang Zemin and U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke on a newly-installed hot line for the first time to discuss tensions in South Asia.
WASHINGTON - The U.S. ambassador to India, Richard Celeste, will return to his post very soon and the ambassador to Pakistan, Thomas Simons, will not be recalled in protest at Pakistan`s nuclear tests.
MOSCOW - The International Monetary Fund said it would soon give Russia a much-needed cash injection to help tackle a financial crisis that is threatening market reforms and political stability.
UNITED NATIONS - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan approved Iraq`s crucial plan on how it will distribute food and medicine to ease the impact of sanctions on its people.
