UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged G8 leaders to live up to their promises to double aid for Africa to 50 billion dollars by 2010. He made the statement on the sidelines of this year's G8 summit which started on the Japanese island of Hokkaido on Monday. The summit's agenda is topped by surging oil and food prices as well as climate change. However, world leaders also used their get-together to discuss more sanctions against Zimbabwe after President Robert Mugabe was re-elected in disputed elections last month. US President George W. Bush called the one-man poll that was boycotted by the opposition a sham, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel called it illegitimate and indicated she would back more sanctions.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has for the first time, met with US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the sidelines of the G8 summit. Medvedev said Moscow and Washington should keep up dialogue despite failing to overcome differences on US missile defence plans in Europe, NATO expansion plans and the status of Kosovo. In talks with Gordon Brown, Medvedev said he wanted to normalise ties with London. Relations have fallen to their lowest point since the Cold War after Russia refused to extradite to Britain an ex-security guard who is accused of poisoning Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Strains in political ties have since then translated into tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats and a row over oil giant TNK-BP.

A suicide bomb attack in the Afghan capital Kabul has left at least 40 people dead and wounded over 140 others. A suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives into two diplomatic vehicles outside the Indian embassy in Kabul during morning rush hour. The dead include several security staff, two senior diplomats as well as many civilians who had been waiting to collect visas. Afghan President Hamid Karzai says terrorists carried out the attack. Monday's suicide bombing was the deadliest in Kabul since the Taliban were removed from power in late 2001 in a US-led invasion.

Austrian conservative Vice-Chancellor Wilhelm Molterer of the People's Party has called for early elections. He accuses his Social Democrats coalition partners of having abandoned the government's common EU policy and says he can no longer effectively govern with them. Last month, Social Democrat Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer announced that his party would submit all European treaties to a referendum. The decision drew criticism even from within his own party. Elections could be held as early as September if the Austrian parliament approves the motion in a vote next week.

European Union ministers meeting in Cannes have backed French proposals for a common policy to stem illegal immigration. France has made harmonising the bloc's immigration policy a priority of its six-month EU presidency that began this month. The pact, which would not be legally binding but would carry political weight, asks EU member states to strengthen the fight against illegal immigration, to crack down on the employers of illegal migrants and to live up to their responsibility to expel illegal residents from their territory. However, EU interior ministers meeting refrained from banning mass legalizations of migrants in an effort to avoid an open breach with Spain.

Authorities in Somalia are searching for three gunmen who on Sunday shot and killed the head of the United Nations' Development Programme and wounded one of his companions. Osman Ali Ahmed was attacked on Sunday evening as he left a mosque near his home in the capital  Mogadishu. He later died of his injuries in an African Union peacekeepers' hospital. Aid workers in Somalia have been increasingly targeted for attacks and abduction ever since the man believed to be al-Qaeda's top operative in the African country was killed in May in a US airstrike. The local head of the UNHCR's refugee mission was recently kidnapped and is still being held.

The Israeli military has begun digging up the bodies of some 190 Hezbollah fighters who were killed in battles with Israel. The exhumation is part of a larger prisoner swap deal between Israel and the Hezbollah. Under that deal, Israel is to release five fighters captured in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war next week. Hezbollah in turn is to hand over two Israeli reserve soldiers whose kidnapping sparked the month-long war. The two Israeli soldiers are believed to be dead. The prisoner swap deal was mediated by the UN-appointed envoy, Gerhard Conrad from Germany.

Lufthansa has cancelled more than 500 flights as members of the pilots union Cockpit hold a 24-hour strike at the carrier's CityLine and Eurowings units in an ongoing pay dispute. The walkout affects passengers at airports across Europe and in Germany, including Lufthansa's main hubs at Frankfurt and Munich. The union called the strike in an effort to secure better salaries and said that employers had not made any concrete offers in the ongoing round of negotiations. Warning strikes disrupted German air traffic in May and June.