DEATHS AND DETENTIONS: Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said he would provide the figures to the UN Human Rights Council on Dec. 11. Meanwhile, six prisoners were freed
A UN investigator said yesterday that his five-day mission to Myanmar enabled him to determine the numbers of people killed and detained in the government's September crackdown on protesters, but that he would not immediately reveal details.

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North and South Korea yesterday agreed on more massive projects to help rebuild the North's broken economy, including freight train services over their heavily armed border that had been severed since the Korean War.

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The slaying of five Australia-based journalists by Indonesian forces in East Timor in 1975 was deliberate and probably ordered by senior officers who may have committed war crimes, a coroner concluded yesterday.

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Australians are the world's worst individual greenhouse gas polluters if emissions are calculated from the output of the country's power stations, a new analysis says.

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Chinese authorities warned foreign activists yesterday that they will not be permitted to stage protests over Tibet and other sensitive issues during next year's Beijing Olympics.

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WISHFUL THINKING: Despite the Palestinian president's tough words, he has little influence in Gaza, while Hamas has taken fresh steps to cement its grip on the territory
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on Thursday for the overthrow of Gaza's Hamas rulers, following the Islamic group's deadly crackdown on his loyalists in June.

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Hundreds of Palestinian professionals and businesspeople led by an influential billionaire launched a new political movement, reflecting growing disillusionment with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.

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INSIDE JOB? : The Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa hinted that two attacks by gunmen would have required intimate knowledge of the compound's defenses
This much is known: Just after midnight on Nov. 8, Anton Gerber was sitting with his fiancee in the control room of South Africa's most secretive nuclear facility, where this nation's apartheid government conceived and delivered six atomic bombs, when four gunmen burst into the room. Gerber pushed his fiancee under a desk. The attackers shot him in the chest, grabbed a computer and fled, but abandoned their booty as they came under assault by guards.

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To locals in the Russian village of Nikolskoye they were simply a group of eccentric Christian believers. And when 29 members of the sect abruptly vanished last week, villagers assumed they had packed up and gone on their way.

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The 103 children caught up in an abduction scandal in Chad wait at an orphanage, unable to return home despite most having been identified as the probe continues into the French charity accused of trying to spirit them to Europe.

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A Saudi court on Tuesday more than doubled the number of lashes that a female rape victim was sentenced to last year after her lawyer appealed the original sentence. The decision, which many lawyers found shocking even by Saudi standards of justice, has provoked a rare public debate about women's rights.

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TALKING TOUGH: The White House dismissed an optimistic report by the UN's nuclear watchdog, said that Iran was uncooperative and warned China not to block sanctions
The US accused Iran on Thursday of "stringing along" UN watchdogs investigating its nuclear ambitions and bluntly warned China not to block new sanctions against the Islamic republic.

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The UN's top climate change official warned on Thursday that the world was in "deep trouble" if it failed to reach an agreement at next month's UN ministerial conference in Bali.

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MONEY FOR WAR: Robert Gates said that if Iraq funds aren't passed, the US will have to start closing army bases and laying off defense employees by February next year
Congress will likely hold off on sending US President George W. Bush money for Iraq until early next year, pushing the Pentagon to the brink of an accounting nightmare and deepening Democrats' conflict with the White House on the war.

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Chilean President Michelle Bachelet didn't flinch when a magnitude-6.8 aftershock -- a major earthquake in its own right -- hit the rubble-filled street where she was reassuring residents left homeless by a major temblor.

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A UN-sponsored Internet conference ended on Thursday with little to show in closing the issue of US control over how people around the world access e-mail and Web sites.

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