A US diplomat was shot and wounded while in a car in Khartoum, Sudan, today in an attack that also killed the official’s Sudanese driver, the US Embassy said.

The British teacher charged with inciting religious hatred for letting her pupils name a teddy bear Mohammed looked tired and distressed when she appeared in a court in Khartoum, Sudan today.

A Sudanese plane carrying 103 passengers and crew was hijacked today and diverted to the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, where the hijacker surrendered.

Somalia’s most powerful politician today offered the country’s Islamic movement a role in government, but said it must pull back its militia to avert a looming war.

Somalia’s president narrowly escaped an assassination attempt today when a car bomb exploded outside the parliament building in the city of Baidoa, but the blast and a subsequent gunbattle left 11 people dead, officials said.

With thousands of people gathered in Central Park to protest against the violence in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan, one speaker likened the destruction there to the Holocaust.

Ethiopian troops in armoured vehicles rolled into the central Somali town of Baidoa today and set up a camp near the home of the interim president, residents said, less than a day after Islamic militants reached the outskirts of the base of a UN-backed, but largely powerless government.

A top official in Somalia’s Islamic militia said his forces will soon seize the base of the country’s weak interim government, a move that would give radical militants uncontested authority over much of the country.

Somalia’s nearly powerless interim government today said it wanted to postpone this weekend’s peace talks with an increasingly radical Islamic militia that has seized control of nearly all of southern Somalia.

After declaring victory in Israeli elections, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Kadima Party said today it would quickly form a broad ruling coalition that will pull out of much of the West Bank and draw Israel’s borders by 2010.

Saddam Hussein’s chief deputy, who has eluded capture since the US-led invasion of Iraq three years ago, purportedly called for Arab leaders to back Iraq’s Sunni-backed insurgency, in an audiotape broadcast today.

Two more key members of Saddam Hussein’s regime were in Allied custody tonight as the hunt for his chief henchmen continued.

There was shock and disbelief at the fall of Baghdad among Arabs today – and also anger at marines wrapping an American flag around a statue of Saddam Hussein.