RACE FOR PRESIDENCY: After years of violence, voters are expected to favor candidates believed to have the greatest chance of restoring peace
When East Timor picks a new president tomorrow, voters hope to end a year of violence and instability that threatened to plunge one of the world's youngest and poorest nations into civil war.

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Centuries after it disintegrated with the decline of the Mongol empire and the rise of sea power, the old Silk Road is to be reinvented in a network of highways and arteries linking the remote desert of northwest China with cities in Europe, the Middle East and Russia.

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China has published rules governing human organ transplants in its latest effort to clean up a business that has been criticized as being profit-driven with little regard for medical ethics.

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TARGETING CIVILIANS: The bus attack, using a device hidden in a tree, was the second in a week after a bus bomb killed 16 people in the eastern town of Ampara on Monday
A roadside bomb tore through a civilian bus in northern Sri Lanka yesterday, killing seven people and wounding 26, the army said, blaming Tamil Tiger rebels for the attack.

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DISASTER AREA: The UN said 34 people were killed in the tsunami and quake, while the government toll was 28. An estimated 7,000 people across the islands are homeless
International aid workers rushed to dig latrines and set up water purification systems in the Solomon Islands tsunami disaster zone yesterday in a frantic bid to stop the spread of disease.

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Bird flu killed a 29-year-old man in Indonesia after he came into contact with dead chickens, taking the country's human death toll from the disease to 74, the health ministry said yesterday.

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Sectarian clashes continued despite a curfew in a remote northern Pakistani town yesterday, leaving at least eight people dead and 45 wounded in two days, officials said.

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PAINFUL IRONY: The country's tourism industry is a major source of the greenhouse gas emissions that are threatening the biodiversity that attracts many tourists
The latest UN report on climate change has sent shivers down the spine of the travel industry, Australian Tourism Export Council spokesman Matthew Hingerty said yesterday.

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CORNERED: The crew insisted they were in Iraqi waters when they were surrounded by Iranian boats and soon realized they had no chance of overpowering the Iranians
The British hostages held captive in Iran for a fortnight on Friday told of the moments they thought they were about to be executed by their captors as the first full account of their ordeal was made public.

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CELEBRATIONS: The influx was partly due to a sense of greater security now that the wave of suicide bombings and Israeli military incursions into the West Bank has calmed
Miljkovic Milivoje, a Serbian iron worker, had been up since before dawn. Mid-morning on Friday, he was sitting on a low wall opposite the Sixth Station of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City. In his left hand was a walking stick and in his right a wooden crucifix he had bought earlier in his pilgrimage holiday after a long climb to the Greek Orthodox chapel on Mount Sinai in Egypt.

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Some in agony, others in ecstasy, Christians around the world marked Good Friday with prayer, processions and pleas for peace.

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A senior Russian lawmaker called yesterday for Russia to be included in US plans to build a missile defense system in Europe, warning Moscow will otherwise view the antimissile shield as a threat.

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AIDING WAR CRIMINALS?: Lawyers will look at a letter warning about the EU's potential culpability as the largest donor to both Somalia and Ethiopia
European lawyers are examining whether alleged war crimes committed by Ethiopian and Somali troops in Mogadishu last week could expose the EU to accusations of complicity because of its formidable financial assistance to the two countries.

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OUT OF THE ORDINARY: Although US lawmakers frequently travel to the Middle East, the representative's position as speaker of the House has afforded her extra attention
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the US House of Representatives who was returning yesterday from a trip through the Middle East, said she thinks her mission helped President George W. Bush because it showed the US was unified against terrorism despite being divided over Iraq.

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One of the surprise hits of US television over the past two seasons is the dark suburban comedy Weeds, which focuses on a struggling middle class widow who starts selling marijuana to her affluent neighbors in southern California.

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Cuba and Venezuela have launched an offensive against biofuels, warning that the US-backed rush toward ethanol will aggravate global hunger and poverty.

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The Acapulco correspondent for Mexico's top television news network was shot to death after his radio show, the latest in a wave of journalist killings that have made Mexico the most dangerous country for reporters in the western hemisphere.

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Rescued from the brink of death by US researchers and other scientists, a group of young endangered Hawaiian monk seals recently released into the wild now can have their progress monitored by an adoring public.

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■ Indonesia
Jet crash was pilot error
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