Indonesia Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, accused of leading an Al-Qaeda-linked group blamed for attacks across Asia, was jailed for two and a half years for involvement in the Bali bombings. Iraq Two suicide car bombs exploded outside Iraq's interior ministry, killing five policemen, while US officials said three of their soldiers died in attacks on Wednesday. Mideast The central committee of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud party was to meet to rally support for a referendum on the government's plan to pull out of the occupied Gaza Strip. IAEA The UN atomic agency called on North Korea to return to six-party talks on its nuclear program, even as Pyongyang ended a self-imposed moratorium on testing long-range missiles and said "hostile" US policy was forcing it to make nuclear weapons. Vatican Pope John Paul II's health is improving after throat surgery to ease his breathing but there is no set date for his departure from hospital, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said. DRCongo A UN military chief in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo dismissed reports that his troops killed civilians during a hard-hitting strike against militias who targetted UN peacekeepers in a murderous ambush. Asia International donors who outbid each other to pledge tsunami relief to Sri Lanka have failed to deliver and the island has received only a fraction of the promised cash, a top official said. Azerbaijan Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev ordered a speedy probe into the murder of one of the ex-Soviet republic's most vocal opposition journalists, but portrayed the killing as a political "provocation" unrelated to a crackdown on media cited by rights groups. France One of France's biggest-ever criminal trials, in which 66 men and women are accused of raping children "sold" by their parents for pitiful sums of money and cigarettes, opened in the western city of Angers. Pakistan A Pakistani court overturned the convictions of five men sentenced to death in 2002 for raping a woman on the orders of a tribal council for her brother's alleged affair, officials said. WTO Senior officials from some 30 countries opened talks in Kenya aimed at easing a bitter north-south divide over world trade. China China accused the United States of serious human rights violations and told Washington to clean up its own act before "wantonly trampling on the sovereignty of other countries". Warcrimes The man who led Muslim forces during the Bosnian war of the 1990's pleaded not guilty to charges of war crimes before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.