West Bank

Israeli forces search homes for militants

Israeli soldiers blew open doors with grenades, rummaged through closets and rounded up residents while searching for fugitives and bomb labs in Nablus’ Old City — the largest army operation in the militant stronghold in more than a year.

Soldiers sealed the Old City with cement blocks and barbed wire to lock in militants and imposed a strict curfew. The military said “Operation Full Court Press” would last several days.

Soldiers handed out leaflets explaining that they are looking for seven men, most from the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a militant group with ties to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

U.S.: N. Korea threatens to test nuclear weapon

North Korea told the United States on Thursday that it would test a nuclear weapon unless Washington accepted Pyongyang’s proposal for a freeze on its atomic program, a senior administration official said.

Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan spoke with Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly in a 2 1/2-hour private discussion in China, where a six-nation conference is being held on the long-running impasse over Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

The United States has been insisting on complete disarmament by the communist state.

The senior administration official said the North Korean threat suggested that the Beijing discussions were headed toward failure. The conference ends today.

Spain

Pigeons lead workers to Renaissance fresco

Pigeons fluttering through a hole in the ceiling of a Spanish cathedral led an art restoration team to discover a hidden Renaissance fresco of winged angels that had been covered by a false ceiling for more than 300 years.

The team had been working on the baroque dome of the cathedral in Valencia for more than a month, removing gray paint and fending off birds, Valencia’s regional government said Thursday.

Their stroke of serendipity came Tuesday when they were drawn to a hole by the pigeons and their cooing.

One of the team leaders, Javier Catala, stuck a digital camera inside, shot blindly and came back with partial but spectacular images of a well-preserved fresco believed to be more than 26 feet in diameter.

Russia

Three militants detained after Ingushetia attacks

Three militants have been detained on suspicion they took part in this week’s attacks in the southern Russian region of Ingushetia, a top military officer said Thursday, as the death toll from the assault rose to 98 people.

Three days after the Monday night attacks in the republic bordering war-torn Chechnya, questions still swirled about where the militants came from.

Ingush President Murat Zyazikov said in an interview published in the Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Thursday that “an international squad” intent on destabilizing Ingushetia was behind the attack.

LONDON

Museum to return Maori heads to New Zealand

Three 19th-century Maori heads that were hidden away in a Glasgow, Scotland, museum for more than 50 years will be returned to their native New Zealand, the Glasgow city council decided Thursday.

Council members voted unanimously to repatriate the tattooed preserved heads, called “toi moko,” along with an 18th-century leg bone of a Maori warrior chief and several other artifacts.

The items were donated to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow between 1900 and 1950 but never put on display.

“There’s a different attitude around now compared to that rife in colonial times when the gruesome practice of collecting human remains was a hobby,” said John Lynch, head of the council’s cultural and services committee.

LONDON

Royal family costs $1.10 per Briton, palace says

Britons are paying about $1.10 each to support Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family, Buckingham Palace said Thursday in an annual summary of its expenses.

The palace, which has been under political pressure to control costs in recent years, said the senior royals’ expenses totaled $66 million in the fiscal year that ended March 31, up 1.7 percent from the previous year.

It noted that if inflation were taken into consideration, expenses decreased by 1 percent.

The biggest expenses were for property maintenance, utilities and telephone and other communications. The $66 million included money for activities of the queen and her husband, Prince Philip, upkeep on royal palaces housing many family members, and travel costs for royals on official duties.

Austria

Official: Al-Qaida threat increasing for elections

Intelligence chatter that is “stronger and more robust” than usual is heightening concerns al-Qaida might launch attacks timed to the U.S. presidential election or the political conventions, a senior U.S. security official told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Adm. James Loy, deputy head of the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview that his agency had received “nothing specific” about an attack on those events.

But, he said, there has been a “constant stream of intelligence that has been stronger and more robust.”

“As you progress onward to the Democratic Party convention and the Republican Party convention and then the election itself, it has all added up to a registry of concern,” Loy said by telephone from an international conference on terror in Vienna.