World

Another delay in voting by the UN Security Council on a resolution demanding that Israel ensure Yasser Arafat's security appeared likely as the Monitor went to press. Deputy US Ambassador James Cunningham told fellow council members that the draft being pushed by Syria was not satisfactory. On Monday, Ambassador John Negroponte said the US would not support the measure unless it "robustly condemned terrorism" and specifically mentioned such Palestinian militant groups as Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

For the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraq will send a delegation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the cartel confirmed. Its next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 24 in Vienna. Although Iraq is a founding member, OPEC previously had insisted that its representatives would be welcome at meetings only when the Baghdad government was recognized by the UN. But that position softened after the Arab League last week seated Iraq's representative.

At least 50 "elite" communist rebel marksmen have infiltrated the capital of the Philippines for an assassination attempt against President Bush, the Manila Times reported. Bush is scheduled for an eight-hour visit to Manila Oct. 18, which is to include the first address to a joint session of Congress by a US chief executive. Intelligence agents had not yet verified such a plot, the newspaper said. The Philippines has been nagged by Muslim and communist rebel insurgencies, and the government's cooperation in the US-led counterterrorism effort is unpopular with many Filipinos and has sparked numerous anti-American public protests.

Police returned to the offices of Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper, seizing computers and other equipment and arresting two photographers who'd been at the scene when the publication was shut down last week. Harare's Daily News, a frequent critic of hard-line President Robert Mugabe, was ordered closed by the Supreme Court under the year-old Access to Information Act because it lacked a license. The Daily News sought an injunction to continue publishing while it sought accreditation.

Twenty-seven more people were reported dead from a fire that raged through a prison near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Monday, raising the number of casualties to 94. First reports said 67 had been killed. Another 23 were being treated for smoke inhalation. The three-hour blaze appeared to have started because of an electrical short-circuit, authorities said.