World

Thousands of Palestinians were allowed back into Israel as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government sought to build goodwill for this week's meeting on peace with his counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, and President Bush. Sources inside Sharon's cabinet meeting Sunday said he announced that he probably would make a declaration at the summit committing Israel to the dismantling of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For his part, Abbas was said to have won the US over to his preferred position on arranging a truce against Israel among Palestinian radical groups through persuasion rather than via a decisive crackdown as demanded by Sharon.

Protests against the Group of Eight summit in Evian, France, turned violent even before the arrival of the participants. At least a dozen injuries were reported - one of them critical - as security forces responded with tear gas to rock-throwing, blocking of roads, and the looting of stores by tens of thousands of anarchists and anticapitalists. The number of arrests could not immediately be determined.

Nobel Peace Prize-winning democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi was back in government custody in Myanmar (Burma), and her political party offices and universities were ordered closed. Nineteen of her followers also were under house arrest in a crackdown ordered after a violent clash Friday as Suu Kyi was continuing a tour of northern cities. Four people died in the fighting; as many as 50 others were hurt. Suu Kyi was released from 19 months of house arrest in May 2002.

Panic buying of food and other supplies was reported in Zimbabwe, and columns of armored vehicles were streaming toward the capital as the nation braced for Monday's start of a week-long antigovernment protest. The protest, organized by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, was declared illegal by a High Court judge. But the MDC was appealing the ruling and vowed the challenge to President Robert Mugabe would proceed regardless.

With moment-by-moment live TV coverage, the gates were closed on China's Yangtze River at the Three Gorges Dam, its most massive construction project since the building of the Great Wall more than 2,000 years ago. The gate-closing began the six-year process of filling the 365-mile-long reservoir behind the hydroelectric dam, which is deemed critical to the power needs of China's fast-growing economy.