LONDON - NATO supreme commander General Wesley Clark on Friday warned Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that NATO had a "vast air armada" ready to strike.

DILI - Residents in the bloodied territory of East Timor reacted with caution on Friday to news they will be able to vote in a U.N-organised ballot on whether they want autonomy within Indonesia.

PRISTINA, Serbia - Hashim Thaqi, the 29-year-old ethnic Albanian guerrilla leader who is supposed to sign an international peace plan for Kosovo, has arrived in this Serbian province.

MOSCOW - Russia said on Friday the enlargement of NATO to include Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic could result in a new fault line between East and West.

JAKARTA - A prominent Moslem cleric from Indonesia`s ravaged island of Ambon said on Friday that riots there constituted ethnic cleansing of Moslems.

The youngest son of disgraced former Indonesian President Suharto was banned on Friday from travelling outside the capital.

TEL AVIV - U.S. Defence Secretary William Cohen met Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Arens on Friday to discuss sales of U.S. fighter jets to Israel and joint funding for the Arrow anti-missile project.

BRUSSELS - European Union environment ministers on Thursday failed to agree on how to limit the use "flexible mechanisms" by countries trying to meet global commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

PALERMO, Italy - Three people were killed on Thursday when a six-storey apartment block collapsed in the Sicilian capital Palermo.

TEHRAN - Iran`s President Mohammad Khatami described his landmark state visit to Italy as "constructive" after arriving back in Tehran.

RIO DE JANEIRO - At least seven states in southern Brazil were hit by an electricity blackout late on Thursday, paralyzing the capital of Brasilia and the country`s two principal cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

HARARE - Allied forces helping Congolese President Laurent Kabila fight a Tutsi-led rebellion backed by Uganda and Rwanda have killed 239 Ugandan troops in battles over the last two weeks.

Five of six Western diplomats and officials accused of spying in the Democratic Republic of the Congo arrived in Zimbabwe on Friday on their way home.

QUITO, Ecuador - Ecuadoreans grappled on Friday with a series of harsh economic measures, including fuel price hikes and freezes on many bank deposits, designed by the government to bring the nation back from the brink of chaos.

edited by

zuzana vilikovská