World briefs

Taiwan's leader welcomes overture from China

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Frozen relations between Taiwan and China showed more rare signs of a thaw Saturday as Taiwan's leader welcomed a new overture from China to start talks about restoring aviation and shipping links between the rivals.

On Wednesday Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen urged Taiwan to start negotiating an end to a ban on ships and planes crossing the 100-mile-wide strait. The restriction began when the two sides split amid civil war in 1949.

To help talks along, Qian said China would soften its preconditions for the negotiations and call the new transportation ties "cross-strait links."

Balinese, tourists flock to site of nightclub blasts

BALI, Indonesia -- Slowly marching past piles of rubble and piles of flowers, hundreds of people chanted Balinese prayers as they said goodbye to the victims of bomb blasts a week ago.

The site of the Sari Club nightclub has become a magnet for community leaders, heartbroken relatives and curious tourists -- much as ground zero did in the days and months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Some come to remember loved ones, others share memories of that frightening night on Oct. 12, and still others want to witness firsthand the destruction they had only seen on television.

Most are transfixed by the scale of the damage, their silence broken only by the pounding of hammers and the occasional groaning of bulldozers clearing the site.

Kuwait official vows to fight terrorism at home

KUWAIT CITY -- Kuwait will not let any of its citizens threaten its ties with the United States, the deputy prime minister said Saturday.

"The Kuwaiti people will not forget those who supported them in the darkest and most difficult circumstances," Sheik Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah said during the Parliament's first meeting since its summer recess.

On Oct. 8, two Kuwaitis, both extremist Muslims and veterans of the Afghan war, attacked U.S. Marines on a break from war games on Failaka island, off the coast of Kuwait. They killed one Marine and injured another before being shot dead by other Marines.

On Thursday, a 17-year-old Kuwaiti was arrested with crude explosives in front of a complex housing Americans.

Kuwait, which owes its 1991 liberation from a seven-month Iraqi occupation to a U.S.-led coalition that fought the Gulf War, denounced the Failaka attack as an act of terror.

French forces work on cease-fire in Ivory Coast

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast -- French forces monitoring Ivory Coast's new cease-fire, which ended four weeks of fighting between government and rebel forces, on Saturday vowed to retaliate if attacked.

With the truce in its second day, French forces said they hoped by Sunday to have agreed-upon rules with both sides for observing the cease-fire.

French troops will deploy patrols, establish observation posts and, in some cases, checkpoints, and agreed contact points between government and rebel forces, said Col. Christian Baptiste, a French military spokesman in Paris. French troops also plan to tell both sides about the kind of activities they will consider hostile.-- From wire reports

"If the situation starts to worsen ... and our forces face aggression, we will strike back strongly -- indeed, very strongly," he said in a telephone interview, citing the situation in Ivory Coast remained "tense."

Baptiste said France has "considerably more" than the 1,000 troops it sent to its former colony to protect and evacuate foreign nationals and provide logistical support to government forces.