World Highlights

¤ France yesterday appealed to Tunisia to shed more light on an attack on a French journalist who was beaten and stabbed in Tunis. Christophe Boltanski, a correspondent for the French newspaper Liberation, is recovering after being beaten, kicked and stabbed in the back by unidentified attackers on Friday.

¤ Explosions at a chemical plant in the northeastern city of Jilin injured more than 30 people yesterday and forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, Chinese media reported. State television showed billowing clouds of black smoke enveloping the city of 1.25 million.

¤ Doctors in earthquake struck Kashmir have begun a campaign to immunise 800,000 children against potentially killer diseases, measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diptheria and polio before the bitter Himalayan winter bites. Children living in remote mountain villages, cut off by landslides, were particularly vulnerable due to malnutrition because they have access to inadequate food supplies.

¤ US-led forces in Iraq are treating with caution reports that Saddam Hussein's deputy has died because it could be a tactic to mislead those still hunting for him, the US military said yesterday. Conflicting reports continue to circulate about whether Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the most senior member of Saddam's deposed government still at large, is alive or dead.

¤ British soldiers could leave Iraq by the end of next year, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said yesterday. "We don't want British forces forever in Iraq. Within one year - I think at the end of 2006 - Iraqi soldiers will be ready to replace British forces in the South," Mr Talabani told ITV's Jonathan Dimbleby programme. Mr Talabani also said, however, that an immediate withdrawal of foreign forces would be a "catastrophe" for Iraq and would lead to civil war.