Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said it was the single biggest loss for the Danish mission in Afghanistan.

Denmark has about 700 soldiers serving in Afghanistan. Twenty-one have been killed since the mission began in 2002.

The admission came after the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, under prodding from an opposition lawmaker, released documents showing that 300 British, Dutch and Australian prisoners of war worked at a mine owned by Aso Mining during the last four months of World War II in western Japan.

At a parliamentary session on Thursday, officials of the health and foreign ministries acknowledged the validity of the documents, which, totaling some 43 pages, were retrieved from the basement of the Health Ministry building.

Work has begun in the German capital, Berlin, on a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Roma, or Gypsies, killed by the Nazis in World War II.

It will feature a square well brimming with water and bearing an inscription of a poem about the Holocaust.

The leader of Germany’s Roma community, Romani Rose, praised the government for “recognising its historical responsibility” to those persecuted.

The Red Army Faction, which was also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, carried out a series of assassinations of leading German figures during the late 1970s and early 1980s, killing 34 people. It disbanded in 1998, several years after renouncing violence. It subscribed to a Marxist-Leninist ideology and sought to overthrow the capitalist West German government and to fight perceived American imperialism.

A German court announced the pending release of Klar, 55, last month, after ruling that he had served the minimum 26 years of a life sentence for killing three prominent West Germans and their bodyguards and trying to kill a U.S. Army general. He was released a few weeks earlier than planned after the authorities in Stuttgart said he no longer posed a threat. He will remain on parole for five years.

The ancient graves of clerics and other prominent people are among holy sites being targeted by the armed group in the port city of Kismayo.

Al-Shabab took control of Somalia’s third-largest city about four months ago and quickly announced it would not tolerate anything it deemed un-Islamic.

Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Adow said Kismayo’s Roman Catholic church was torn down just days after they seized power through bloody fighting.

“They are planning to replace it with a mosque.”

Shortly after the armed wing of Hamas formally announced the six-month truce was over, the smaller Islamic Jihad group said it fired three rockets at Israel, which caused no reported damage or casualties.

At dawn, Hamas’s Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades military wing said: “The ceasefire is over and there won’t be a renewal because the Zionist enemy has not respected its conditions.”

One day after the truce between Israel and the Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip officially ended, hope for an unofficial ceasefire appeared grim, with rockets and mortar shells continuing to rain down on the western Negev, and the IAF quickly responding.

Approximately a dozen mortar shells were fired into Israel on Saturday afternoon. One of them hit a youth clubhouse at a kibbutz close to the Gaza Strip. No one was wounded in the attack as the building was empty at the time but damage was caused to the structure.

The fire at the humane society shelter in Oshawa also killed three dogs and some rats that were up for adoption.

An initial report from the fire marshal says mice or rats chewing through electrical wires in the ceiling are likely to have sparked the blaze.

Offers of help have been pouring in from animal lovers across Canada.

“It’s unfortunate and ironic that mice caused the fire that killed the cats,” Toronto Humane Society spokesman Ian McConachie told the BBC News website.

“Unfortunately, the mice probably perished in the fire as well,” he added.

The $250,000 (£137,000) fire is still under investigation by the Ontario Fire Marshal’s office.

That dread was palpable in France when President Nicolas Sarkozy abruptly delayed for one year a plan to overhaul France’s high schools, after students from Bordeaux to Brittany took to the streets in protest.

Those demonstrations haven’t turned violent yet. But French history, and the example of Greece, suggests they might. At least that is what people like Laurent Fabius, a Socialist Party leader, are saying on French radio.

For that, Mohamed was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in federal prison, the maximum allowed under the law for the charge he pleaded guilty to, providing material support to terrorists.

The government has already postponed plans to reform the secondary school curriculum after sometimes violent protests this month but students have kept up demonstrations to demand the plan be dropped permanently.

On Thursday, several thousand took part in protests in the Paris region and provincial cities including Lyon and Rennes in western France.

In Lyon, students threw stones at police, a car was overturned near the city’s education headquarters and one school had to be evacuated after smoke from fires lit in nearby rubbish bins spread through the buildings, a Reuters reporter said.

Rangzieb Ahmed, 33, was found guilty by a jury at Manchester Crown Court of belonging to the group and of leading a three-man terrorist cell engaged in plotting an attack, possibly overseas.

His co-defendant, Habib Ahmed, 29, who is no relation, was also found guilty of belonging to al-Qaeda. The two will be sentenced tomorrow.

Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Porter said: “Rangzieb Ahmed is a very dangerous man. He consorts with senior terrorist figures and has devoted his life to creating and working with terrorist networks.