WASHINGTON - Most Americans oppose the impeachment of President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, but 58 percent feel he should resign anyway if the House of Representatives votes for a trial in the Senate.

TEHRAN - About 2,000 Iranian writers and their supporters gathered to bury poet Mohammad Mokhtari, amid word the authorities had made arrests in the string of mystery murders of secularist cultural figures.

PARIS - French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin appealed for calm after two days of rioting in immigrant neighbourhoods of the southwestern city of Toulouse.

MOSCOW - President Boris Yeltsin said Russia would push on with economic reforms and continue to have an active foreign policy despite its severe financial crisis.

ANKARA - Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz said in comments published that Turkey and Italy were in negotiations on sending Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan from Italy to a third country.

JOHANNESBURG - UNITA rebels launched fierce attacks on two strategic towns in central Angola as the southern African state slid further towards renewed civil war.

BELGRADE - Thirty-one ethnic Albanians were killed in fighting with Yugoslav border guards in Kosovo which shattered a fragile truce in the troubled Serbian province.

CONAKRY - Vote counting stretched into the early hours of Tuesday after Guinea‘s weekend election, with President Lansana Conte making a good showing in votes declared at a handful of polling stations in the capital.

JOHANNESBURG - Thousands of Angolans have fled the scene of fierce fighting that has broken out between government and UNITA rebel forces.

HOUSTON - The commander of space shuttle Endeavour said that once they assembled the first two parts of the $60 billion International Space Station, "We kept pinching ourselves and saying: ‘It can‘t be real.‘"

BOGOTA - Colombian government officials met top Marxist guerrilla leaders and agreed to launch formal peace talks on January 7, breaking a five-week deadlock over precise ground rules for the negotiations.

TEHRAN - Iranian moderates blasted conservative rivals in the state security apparatus for failing to halt a string of mystery murders that has unnerved the nation and forced some secularist intellectuals into hiding.

KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysian authorities drew blood from sacked finance minister Anwar Ibrahim after he was arrested, on the pretext of testing it for the AIDS virus.

HARARE - The World Council of Churches (WCC) closed a conference proclaiming it had fulfilled its mission to rally the faithful while also facing controversial issues such as homosexuality.

TUNIS - Libya‘s general People‘s Congress, the country‘s top legislative body, said it was satisfied with a plan to try two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing in a neutral country.

LOME - Guinea-Bissau President Joao Bernardo Vieira and rebel leader Ansumane Mane held talks on implementing a fragile peace deal in the former Portuguese colony.

MARRAKESH - Morocco said it was awaiting clarifications from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan before giving its final answer to his peace plan to resolve the long-running conflict in Western Sahara.