KIGALI - Some 24 genocide suspects released recently from prison because of their age or poor health were killed in January in separate "mob justice" attacks.
LONDON - British police launched a special unit to combat West African organised crime gangs, mostly from Nigeria, which are costing the country at least 3.5 billion pounds ($5.8 billion) a year.
ABIDJAN - Many telephone subscribers in Ivory Coast faced disruption because of a continuing strike by telecommunications workers over pay.
WASHINGTON - U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said the threat of Asia's financial crisis spreading further had been contained for now but cautioned much work remained to be done in the region.
U.S. President Bill Clinton proposed the first U.S. balanced budget in 30 years, seeking to reverse the long legacy of deficits that began in the Vietnam War and accelerated over the next quarter century. The fiscal 1999 budget, which covers the year starting on October 1, calls for $1.73 trillion in spending and forecasts a surplus of $9.5 billion for the year and $218.8 billion over the next five years.
WASHINGTON - An appeals court handed Microsoft Corp. a swift and significant victory, stopping a Harvard law professor or anyone else from serving as a special adviser to a U.S. District Court judge hearing the Justice Department case against the software giant.
JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under fire from Israelis fearing a repeat of Gulf War-style Scud missile strikes, has pledged to relax a government gagging-order on threats posed by Iraq's arsenal. Iraq has so far refrained from sabre-rattling against Israel in its battle of nerves with Washington over United Nations weapons inspections.
SEOUL - A North Korean soldier crossed into South Korean territory at the United Nations truce village of Panmunjom.
AUSTIN, Texas - Condemned killer Karla Faye Tucker was running out of time and options after a state parole board and a federal judge rejected 11th-hour pleas to keep her from becoming the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. Tucker, 38, was set to die by lethal injection on Tuesday evening in a state prison in Huntsville, Texas unless Texas Gov. George W. Bush or the U.S. Supreme Court step in to save her.
CHICAGO - The United States and other industrialized nations are in danger of losing track of the AIDS epidemic. The numbers of new AIDS cases are significantly down, but more and more it is becoming a disease of the poor and disadvantaged.
ATLANTA - An organization calling itself the Army of God, which claimed responsibility for two Georgia explosions last year, said it had planted a bomb at a Birmingham, Alabama, women's clinic that killed a police officer.
MELBOURNE - Australia's powerful maritime union vowed to allow "scab" workers onto the nation's waterfront as its members came under threat of legal action.
BAGHDAD - Iraq dismissed as "totally incorrect" reports it would allow U.N. inspection of presidential sites, but said discussions to resolve the crisis over access for weapons inspectors were continuing.
LAGOS - Nigeria's army said a military tribunal would be set up this week to try those arrested for plotting to overthrow military ruler General Sani Abacha. The army says more than 50 officers and civilians have been arrested in connection with the alleged plot since December 21, the date on which it says the coup would have taken place.
