CAPE TOWN - South Africa has decided to shoot all pigeons in the its North-West diamond producing area, because the birds are being used to smuggle gems out of the country.
BRUSSELS - The European Commission said 11 EU member states had met qualification criteria for economic and monetary union (EMU) and were fit to launch the single currency project in January 1999.
BONN - U.S. and European foreign ministers began a meeting to discuss pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to seek a peaceful solution for the province of Kosovo.
MOSCOW - Russian Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said that his party, which dominates the lower house of parliament, will insist on forming a coalition government.
KOFARNIKHON, Tajikistan - Tajik opposition forces killed 20 soldiers and took 180 hostage in an overnight attack on a battalion of Interior Ministry troops.
BAGHDAD - The head of a United Nations team of diplomats assembled to join inspections of eight "presidential sites" said preparations were complete, but it was up to the weapons experts to decide when they would start.
DUBAI - About 600,000 Moslems have arrived in Saudi Arabia from all over the world to perform the annual haj pilgrimage.
BUENOS AIRES - Argentina's Congress repealed amnesty laws for human rights crimes committed during the 1976-83 dictatorship, but victims' hopes of seeing perpetrators back in
jail are unlikely to be met.
VANCOUVER - Britain's Prince Charles and his sons William and Harry launched into their Canadian visit with the boys getting much of the attention, especially from teenage girls.
MOSCOW - Foreign leaders may get their first close look at Russia's new prime minister when French President Chirac and German Chancellor Kohl fly in for a "troika" summit.
CANBERRA - Australia's parliament handed the conservative government its first trigger for an early election widely expected later this year. PM John Howard can dissolve both houses of parliament at any time and call an election.
BAGHDAD - An Iraqi official dismissed as "silly and baseless" British government suggestions that Baghdad was planning to smuggle lethal anthrax into Britain.
UNITED NATIONS - U.N. investigators digging in the north of the former Zaire found at least one mass grave with all the bodies removed in a possible attempt to destroy evidence.
MONROVIA - The Liberian government said the country was calm after a shooting incident around the home of ex-warlord Roosevelt Johnson.
JERUSALEM - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Israel's willingness to accept Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal from Lebanon was significant.
Israel said it would let thousands of Palestinian Christians enter the country to celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation.
BAGHDAD - Iraq will allow United Nations arms inspectors to meet a top Iraqi germ warfare scientist who was detained for trying to flee the country.
NOUAKCHOTT - Mauritania's president pardoned four Mauritanian human rights activists, jailed for 13 months for their involvement in a foreign television programme on slavery.
MOGADISHU - Somali faction chiefs met to prepare for a national reconciliation conference set for March 31, but clan bloodletting of the kind that has wrecked the country since 1991 flared anew in Mogadishu.
