Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller today received a petition with 60,000 signatures calling for reconciliation between Denmark and the Muslim world following the crisis over the Prophet Mohammed cartoons.

OSAMA bin Laden has vowed never to be captured alive and said the US military had become as “barbaric” as Saddam Hussein in an audiotape posted on a militant website.

Austria’s foreign minister said today that an emergency meeting with her Danish counterpart and leading representatives of the international Islamic community had made progress on diffusing tensions over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The Danish government was to brief parliament today on the attacks on Danish diplomatic missions during protests over a newspaper’s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

Muslim rage over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed spilled out of Syria today into neighbouring Lebanon where thousands of protesters – undaunted by police tear gas and water cannons – torched the Danish mission and ransacked a Christian neighbourhood.

Denmark, which holds a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, wants to create a United Nations ombudsman whose job will be to scrutinise the names on the world body’s terrorist lists.

Denmark today said it was not worried by reports that two Canadian warships were heading for a tiny Arctic island claimed by both countries.

A GROWING number of countries and foreign companies working in Iraq whose nationals or employees have been snatched and threatened with death are bowing to abductors' demands in a hostage crisis that refuses to subside.

European leaders condemned the Madrid bomb blasts as an attack on Spanish democracy.

A top official with the International Committee of the Red Cross said today it was “unacceptable” for the United States to hold terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial.

Swedish premier Goeran Persson has said Sweden’s tradition of openness has been damaged by the killing of foreign minister Anna Lindh.

Ten candidate nations to join the European Union today sat down with EU negotiators seeking to overcome the final obstacle of more financial aid.

Israel was accused of a massacre today after at least 13 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded during a devastating army raid on a Gaza Strip town.

European, UN and Arab officials roundly condemned Israel’s missile strike on an apartment building housing a wanted militant leader, terming it unjustified, criminal and counterproductive.