In the World

MOGADISHU, Somalia - Islamist insurgents and Ethiopian soldiers turned the streets of the Somali capital into a battleground for a fourth straight day, firing rockets and mortar rounds at each other yesterday in what a human rights official said was the worst violence in years.

At least 165 civilians have been killed in this week's fighting, including at least 52 yesterday as residents hid indoors, cowered under trees, or abandoned the city.

Dahir Dhere, director of the Medina hospital, said it had more wounded patients than it could handle and had pitched tents outside to care for them.

Hundreds of women, children and men walked or piled into trucks to flee to Mogadishu's outskirts or leave the city, joining an exodus of hundreds of thousands who have abandoned Mogadishu since February. - AP

NABLUS, West Bank - Israeli troops killed six Palestinians, including a 17-year-old girl, in the bloodiest day of fighting this year across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials said yesterday.

The dead included three militants traveling together in a car in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, and a man in Gaza killed in an Israeli air strike in response to a Palestinian rocket attack.

Israeli officials defended the operations as the latest steps in their war against Palestinian militants. But Palestinian officials said the bloodshed only hurt efforts to expand a cease-fire in Gaza to the West Bank. - AP

MOSCOW - Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion who is one of the Kremlin's most visible critics, accused Russian police of "brutality and cruelty" for their crackdown against antigovernment demonstrations last weekend.

Kasparov met with prosecutors he said had summoned him after a lawmaker's demand for an inquiry into whether police acted illegally when they took him and hundreds of others into custody during a Moscow protest on April 14.

"There was only one extremist on the streets of Moscow on April 14, and that was the government and its law enforcement officers," Kasparov told reporters outside the prosecutor's office. - AP

The owner of a South African game reserve was mauled to death by a pride of lions Friday as helpless paramedics looked on. Dirk Brink, 58, was owner of the Krugersdorp Game Reserve, near Johannesburg.

American billionaire Charles Simonyi returned yesterday from a voyage to the international space station, riding a Russian capsule to a soft landing on the Kazak. Simonyi, 58, who helped design Microsoft Word and Excel, paid $25 million for the two-week trip.

Photographs published in Cuba's party newspaper yesterday showed Fidel Castro meeting and shaking hands with a visiting Chinese official, the latest sign the Cuban leader is becoming increasingly active more than eight months after undergoing emergency intestinal surgery.

The Bolivian military retook control of a natural gas pipeline to Argentina after days of violent protests at gas installations in southern Bolivia, the government said late Friday. More than 1,000 protesters seized a pipeline station and threatened to shut off gas deliveries.