Iraq Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari gave the green light for an all-out offensive by Iraqi and US troops to wrest control of a northern town from Sunni Arab insurgents. Ukraine Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was faced with a tough new political rival after sacked premier Yulia Tymoshenko broke with the "orange revolution" leader ahead of a key election. US Police in New Orleans continued the grisly search for those killed in Hurricane Katrina after a top federal official in charge of disaster relief fell casualty of mounting criticism of the operation. Japan Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made his final campaigning stops ahead of a snap election in which he is widely expected to win a new mandate for controversial economic reforms. Egypt Less than a fifth of the electorate voted for the incumbent Hosni Mubarak in Egypt's presidential poll, curtailing the veteran leader's legitimacy as he kicks off his last mandate. Congo Thirteen people were killed when an Antonov 26 aircraft crashed during a storm near Brazzaville, on its descent to Kinshasa airport across the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), officials said. Ivory Coast The leader of Ivory Coast's former rebel movement said that President Laurent Gbagbo must stand down at the end of next month despite the impossibility of organising an election to replace him. Afghanistan Afghanistan's defence minister narrowly escaped an apparent assassination attempt while another minister and the army chief survived a helicopter crash in a dramatic day of near-misses, officials said. Netherlands The Amsterdam court, which sentenced the father of Pakistan's nuclear program Abdul Qadeer Khan to four years in prison in 1983, has lost Khan's legal files and the court's vice-president suspects the CIA had a hand in the documents' disappearance. Bosnia The United States would like to see the 10th anniversary in November of the peace deal that ended Bosnia's 1992-95 war marked with the arrests of two key war crimes suspects, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, an official said. Monaco Prince Albert II of Monaco agreed in an interview that he was tricked into fatherhood by the woman with whom he had a five-year relationship, who said earlier this year that she became pregnant after forgetting to take the contraceptive pill.