Reuters World News Highlights 1400 GMT Jan 24

www.forbes.com Reuters, 01.24.03, 9:01 AM ET

TOKYO/BAGHDAD - The United States said it had "very convincing evidence" Iraq possessed banned weapons as a trans-Atlantic rift widened over whether Baghdad should be disarmed by force. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, Washington's top arms control diplomat, said Iraq has maintained an extensive programme for the production of weapons of mass destruction, including long-range ballistic missiles banned since the 1991 Gulf War.

BAGHDAD - U.N. arms experts visited only one site on the Muslim day of rest, ahead of next week's crucial report to the Security Council on the results of their nearly eight-week search in Iraq.

SEOUL - South Korea said it would send a special envoy to the communist North to discuss the peninsula's nuclear crisis, an announcement that came just hours after the two sides agreed to work for a peaceful solution. President-elect Roh Moo-hyun issued his own overture, saying he planned to propose a summit with North Korea's reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il.

DAVOS, Switzerland - A South Korean envoy urged North Korea to act fast to defuse a crisis over its nuclear programme, saying time was not on Pyongyang's side. Chung Dong-young, envoy of President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, also said he believed Pyongyang feared it would become the United States' next target after Iraq.

PARIS - Rival Ivory Coast factions united behind a peace plan to end four months of bloody civil war by setting up a coalition government and taking urgent steps to ease ethnic strife, delegates at closed-door talks said.

GAZA - Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinians and unleashed air strikes after militants killed three soldiers in a surge of bloodshed four days before Israel's general election. The swift army response was likely to boost rightist Likud party Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Tuesday's balloting.

JERUSALEM - Visiting a shrine where the faithful believe prayers are answered, Labour Party leader Amram Mitzna made a pilgrimage to Judaism's Western Wall before an Israeli election he looks set to lose.

BARCELONA, Spain - Spanish police rounded up 19 suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network in predawn raids against suspected al Qaeda cells in Barcelona and the surrounding region, officials said.

BERLIN - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said the current rift between some European nations and the United States over the Iraq crisis underlined the need for the European Union to develop a common foreign policy.

MOSCOW - A European human rights envoy urged Russia to call off a constitutional referendum in Chechnya, saying it was doomed to fail while violence exploded daily and the views of ordinary Chechens were ignored.

TURIN, Italy - Gianni Agnelli, one of Italy's most powerful businessmen who turned the family car company Fiat into a global industrial giant, has died aged 81, his family said. He had been suffering from prostate cancer.

MELBOURNE - Australia braced for a second black weekend as officials said high winds and extreme heat, with temperatures forecast to exceed 40 degrees Celsius, could fan bushfires that have so far killed four people and razed up to 540 homes.

CARACAS, Venezuela - A six-nation group led by the United States and Brazil was ready to make a fresh bid to end Venezuela's political conflict, a day after a grenade blast in Caracas stoked fears of increasing violence in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.