The attack was the latest challenge for the United Nations force, which has been heralded as having the ability to quell the violence in Darfur.

The snub opens the way for the parent of the nation’s largest carrier, Air China, to make an offer of its own.

For more than three decades, Mr. Vrinat was the owner of the Taillevent restaurant in Paris, which is regarded by many as the pinnacle of elegance in French cuisine.

The government blamed Tamil rebels for the assassination, the first of a top Sri Lankan official in 19 months.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the 19-year-old son of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s assassinated opposition leader, said at a news conference in London that the United States would have to stop “supporting dictators” in Pakistan for Islamic extremism to be defeated there. Returning to Britain from Pakistan two weeks after his mother’s death to resume his first-year studies at Oxford, he gave a battery of feisty answers to reporters who questioned the Pakistan Peoples Party’s decision to pick him as his mother’s successor as party chairman. To a reporter who suggested he had been appointed to the post “like a piece of family furniture,” he said he had not sought it, but added, “It was recognized at this moment in crisis the party needed a close association with my mother through the bloodline.” Asked if he feared for his life, he replied: “How many Bhuttos can you kill? From every house a Bhutto will come.” Noting that the party had selected his father, Asif Ali Zardari, as the party’s co-chairman until he finishes his university degree, he said he would step “gradually and carefully” into politics. He renewed the family’s demands for a United Nations inquiry into his mother’s death and spoke out against American support for the generals who have ruled Pakistan for more than half its 60-year existence. “The problem is that dictatorships breed extremism, and once the U.S. stops supporting dictators, we can successfully tackle extremists,” he said.

A 15-year-old Boy Scout foiled an assassination attempt on President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, grabbing a man’s knife as he leapt from a crowd and lunged at the leader, a government spokesman said. The president was unhurt, although the knife ripped his shirt. No motive was given. The boy, in his scout uniform for the event on the northern island of Hoarafushi, suffered a hand injury.

Prime Minister Romano Prodi announced emergency measures to deal with Naples’ mounting garbage crisis, including three new incinerators, a special garbage czar, and an attempt to get other regions to volunteer to take the trash. The northern Valle d’Aosta offered to help, reports said.

The State Council, China’s cabinet, banned the production of thin plastic bags and will forbid China’s supermarkets to offer them free beginning June 1, saying they cause pollution and waste resources. The council said shoppers should return to using cloth bags. The Chinese use up to three billion plastic bags a day and the country has to refine 37 million barrels of crude oil every year to make plastics used for packaging, according to a report on the Web site of China Trade News.

An ancestral circadian clock mechanism is defined in monarch butterflies, in which two proteins function as critical components. The proteins may also function as output molecules that connect the clock to the sun compass for successful navigation.

Doctors know an impaired sense of smell is an early indicator of Parkinson's disease. Now they want to know if a smell test can help determine if people with no symptoms eventually develop the disease.

A new study from Danish researchers has found that childless men have a lower risk of developing prostate cancer than fathers, and that, paradoxically, the more children a father has, the lower the risk of the disease.

The link between eating oatmeal and cholesterol reduction is stronger than when the FDA initially approved the health claim's appearance on food labels in 1997, a new study shows.

Researchers have achieved optical waveguiding of near-infrared light through features embedded in self-assembled, three-dimensional photonic crystals. Applications for the optically active crystals include low-loss waveguides, low-threshold lasers and on-chip optical circuitry.

The percentage of teens who report solely positive benefits from not having sex declines precipitously with age, according to a new study. The greatest change in attitudes was among teens who became sexually experienced during the study period. For those teens, the percentage who said that not having sex resulted in only positive experiences dropped from 40 percent to 6 percent.

Astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst, took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.