World News Highlights 0600 GMT Nov 13

HONG KONG - Japan stood ready to offer more than $100 billion to emerging economies as governments scrambled to come to grips with a fast-moving financial crisis that threatened to tip the world into a deep and long recession.

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SEOUL - North Korea may be hoping to squeeze concessions from the international community by refusing to let inspectors remove samples from a plutonium-producing nuclear plant, the South's foreign minister said on Thursday.

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ISLAMABAD - Gunmen kidnapped an Iranian diplomat and killed his guard in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar on Thursday, police said, the latest violence against foreigners in the volatile region.

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MOSCOW - The Kremlin on Wednesday rejected U.S. proposals aimed at easing concerns over a missile defence system in Europe and said it would try again to resolve the row once Barack Obama is in the White House.

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TEHRAN - Iran said it test-fired a new generation of surface-to-surface missile on Wednesday and that the Islamic Republic was ready to defend itself against any attacker.

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KHARTOUM - Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, facing a possible indictment by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Darfur, announced a ceasefire in the region on Wednesday.

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MOGADISHU - Islamist rebels captured a port near the Somali capital on Wednesday without firing a shot, giving them their closest foothold to Mogadishu yet and raising the stakes in a two-year insurgency.

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CHICAGO - President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday named a bipartisan duo of Washington veterans to meet foreign delegations at this weekend's global financial summit, opening communication between the next U.S. administration and its global counterparts.

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MIAMI - The head of UBS AG's wealth management business, Raoul Weil, has been charged with conspiring to help thousands of wealthy Americans hide $20 billion of assets from U.S. tax authorities in Swiss bank accounts.

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KABUL - Six people were killed and at least 40 wounded in a suicide bomb attack on government buildings in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, officials said, but a brother of the Afghan president who was in one of the offices was unhurt.