Australia today relocated its Afghanistan embassy out of a popular luxury hotel in Kabul that Taliban militants stormed yesterday, killing seven people.

Militants with suicide vests, grenades and AK-47 rifles attacked a luxury hotel in Afghanistan today, killing at least six people in the most brazen attack yet on Western civilians in Kabul, witnesses and a Taliban spokesman said.

Former US vice president Al Gore and the United Nations’ chief climate scientist met Norwegian leaders early today to kick off the official programme leading up to them accepting the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo tomorrow.

Zimbabwe’s neighbours are under increasing pressure to do something about its chaos – in part because it is already spilling over in the form of migrants fleeing economic collapse and political clampdown.

A 48-nation meeting on cluster bombs opened in Oslo, Norway, today with Austria pledging to ban the weapons and organisers saying an international treaty outlawing the munitions could be achieved by 2008.

Denmark’s foreign minister today blamed extremists for violent protests in Muslim countries against the Prophet Mohammed cartoons and warned that al-Qaida would exploit the situation.

Kuwait’s state-supported supermarkets today announced a boycott of Danish products, and the Foreign Ministry called in a regional Danish ambassador to protest at caricatures in a Danish newspaper that have been deemed insulting to Islam’s prophet.