ISRAEL has blamed the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv yesterday that killed nine people and wounded dozens more. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombing at a sandwich stand near Tel Aviv's old central bus station, in the middle of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Emergency services said eight people were killed as well as the bomber. Police said more than 50 were wounded

Iran has expanded its uranium-conversion facilities in Isfahan and reinforced its Natanz underground uranium-enrichment plant, a U.S. think tank said amid growing speculation about U.S. military action. Former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani responded yesterday to a published report that Washington was mulling the use of tactical nuclear weapons to knock out Iran's subterranean nuclear sites. Any U.S. attack on Iran would plunge the region into instability, he said. U.N

Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia's longest-serving post-Soviet prime minister and an economic reformer with strong credentials, has stepped up his campaign to lead Russia's liberal forces and be elected the country's next president in 2008. But with his personal popularity low and the Kremlin maintaining a tight grip on the press, analysts say he faces an uphill struggle. Mr

FOR more than four years relatives of the victims had waited to walk into a courtroom and hold someone responsible for the wreckage of their lives. So they told a court on Monday that in the long days and nights since September 11, 2001, children had spent more time at counselling than school. Parents, unable to sleep, had spent hours in their children's rooms. A young widow had given up her fight against breast cancer

THE head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog is to travel to Iran as one of the United States' most famous investigative reporters says the US has drawn up plans to destroy Tehran's underground nuclear facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. The story in The New Yorker is certain to raise the temperature of the nuclear stand-off between Iran and the US

A panel of diplomats and terrorism experts has given the US Congress a stern warning: expect more radical Islamist-inspired terrorism in Europe. The panel also cautioned last week that European Islamic extremism directly threatened the US because European tourists were not required to have a visa to enter the US, thus making it easier for potential terrorists to slip through

THREE young Australians including two teenagers - described by their counsel as impressionable and susceptible to a predatory crime syndicate - have been sentenced to long prison terms after pleading guilty to trying to smuggle more than 700 grams of heroin from Hong Kong to Australia last April. Chris Ha Vo, 16, was sentenced to nine years and Rachel Ann Diaz, 18, to 10 years and eight months after counsel argued that their youth and remorse warranted lighter sentences

A STRONG earthquake hit Lorestan province in western Iran yesterday, killing at least 66 people and heavily damaging villages in the area, a senior provincial official said. Nearly 1000 people were injured, said Lorestan's Governor-General, Mohammad Reza Mohseni-Sani, and hospitals in the Doroud and Boroujerd area, where the quake struck, were full of injured. He called for assistance from surrounding areas. The quake, which registered 6.0 on the Richter scale, struck at 4

WEN JIABAO, the Chinese Premier, who arrives in Perth today for his first official visit to Australia, embodies the increasingly divergent political loyalties of China's leadership. In one role he is Wen the Premier of the Chinese state, the man who pulls the fiscal and monetary levers on the tearaway Chinese economy and who in formal terms reports to the ostensible source of law, the National People's Congress

Caspar Weinberger, who oversaw the biggest and costliest military build-up in peacetime history as Ronald Reagan's secretary of defence, has died at the age of 88. A self-assured man and a tenacious debater, Mr Weinberger served in Washington off and on for almost 20 years. Many felt his record was marred late in life by questions about his role in the Iran-Contra affair - questions a presidential pardon left unresolved - but his resume was impressive by any standard