• Gandhi support claim disputed

  India's opposition leader, Ms Sonia Gandhi (52), yesterday claimed her Congress party would form a new government within two days. p
  

• Blair claims Serbs instruct Simpson

  The Prime Minister, Mr Blair, yesterday claimed that the veteran BBC correspondent, John Simpson, was producing reports from Belgrade under Serb instructions. p
  

• Family sues suspects, police

  London - The parents of Stephen Lawrence yesterday began the process of suing the suspects accused of his murder and the Metropolitan Police Service for bungling the investigation into his death. p
  

• Warning over Jamaica travel

  Kingston - Protesters exchanged gunfire with security forces and barricaded streets with wrecked cars and burning tyres in the Jamaican capital yesterday as the death toll rose to four in unrest over fuel tax rises. p
  

• Lewis to quit BBC news

  London - Newscaster Martyn Lewis is to quit BBC News altogether when the new look Six O'Clock bulletin is launched on BBC 1 next month, it was announced yesterday. However, he will continue to work for the corporation on shows like the successful Crimebeat specials he presents, as well as pursuing other areas. p
  

• China reduces number of poor

  Beijing - The number of Chinese people living below the poverty line has been cut to 42 million last year from 250 million in 1978, the official Xinhua news agency reported yesterday. In 1978, China was home to one quarter of the world's poor. p
  

• Bhutto asked to defend her seat

  Islamabad - The former Pakistani prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and her husband have been asked to present their cases for keeping their parliamentary seats on Saturday, the country's leading election official said yesterday. p
  

• Torrential rain in Sri Lanka

  Colombo - Two days of torrential rains in Sri Lanka have left five people dead and thousands homeless, officials said yesterday. p
  

• Execution for double murder

  Jarratt - A Virginia man convicted of stabbing and shooting to death his uncle and another elderly man during a 1990 robbery was executed by lethal injection in a state prison on Tuesday, a prison spokesman said. Arthur Ray Jenkins (29) had been out of jail for about a month when he committed the murders. p
  

• Rebels deny role in massacre

  Abidjan - Rebels fighting in Sierra Leone said yesterday their forces played no part in a massacre of civilians in a small town east of the capital Freetown last week. Mr Omrie Golley, spokesman for the rebel Revolutionary United Front, said: "We did not do it." p
  

• East Timor remains volatile despite ceasefire

  A ceasefire agreement was signed in Dili yesterday at the behest of the Indonesian armed forces chief, Gen Wiranto, under which pro-Indonesian militias who have been attacking unarmed civilians have undertaken to lay down their arms. p
  

• El-Al crash report to say if cargo was toxic

  The Hague - Seven years after an El-Al cargo plane plunged into an Amsterdam suburb, a parliamentary committee will publish today a potentially explosive report on the crash, El-Al's role and the Dutch response. p
  

• US report accuses China

  Washington - United States intelligence officials accused China yesterday of stealing US nuclear weapons information, including data related to the US's most advanced nuclear warhead and the neutron bomb. p
  

• No terrorist found after alarm

  Moscow - An airliner made an emergency landing in the central Russian city of Samara yesterday, after a stewardess found a note in the toilet saying there was a "terrorist" on board demanding to be flown to Iran. p
  

• Mandela's ex-wife boosts Mbeki

  Pretoria - Ms Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said yesterday that South Africa will be better governed under expected incoming president, Mr Thabo Mbeki, than it has been in the past five years under President Nelson Mandela, her former husband. p
  

• Spencer's speech for schools

  London - Earl Spencer's emotional farewell speech at the funeral of his sister Diana, Princess of Wales, is to be studied by 11 to 14-year-olds in secondary schools from this spring. The speech is in Grammar in Context by Mr Geoff Barton, deputy headmaster of Thurston Upper School, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. p
  

• 3,000 admire new Reichstag

  Berlin - Three thousand Germans streamed into the refurbished Reichstag yesterday to see the building which will house the new seat of German democracy later this year. p
  

• Scope for invasion widens before summit

  NATO's theatre of operations was widened yesterday from the tiny province of Kosovo when the Czech and Slovak governments approved military movements across their territory - a development which could open the way for an eventual invasion of Serbia from the north. p
  

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