Gaza City  - Five small children, aged 3 to 7, gathered Thursday outside a small kiosk in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, carrying dirty yellow and red plastic jugs to fill up water from a metal tank.

As night fell, Ghassan, the shop owner, sat in darkness, since the enclave still suffers from regular power cuts. A picture of dead Hamas leaders, killed over the years by Israel, hung behind him.

"I do this for humanitarian reasons, for the people," the man said, offering guests a cup of water.

Vienna  - Austrian police have started to contact Chechen exiles whose names appear on an alleged death list published on the internet, following the murder of a Chechen refugee last week, an interior ministry spokesman said Thursday.

In another sign that police are increasing security for Chechens, around 100 officers and a police helicopter were deployed Thursday in Vienna for the funeral of Umar Israilov, 27, who was shot by two unknown men near his Vienna home on January 13.

Washington  - US Treasury secretary-designee Timothy Geithner on Thursday said he believed China was deliberately keeping its currency devalued and signalled the new Obama administration would not give China a "free pass" to keep its trading advantage.

"President Obama - backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists - believes that China is manipulating its currency," he said Thursday, in written responses to questions from the Senate Finance Committee.

Washington  - High profile Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz received an envelope laden with white powder, after a number of similar letters were sent to a New York newspaper earlier this week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Thursday.

All the letters were postmarked from Knoxville, Tennessee, the FBI said in an e-mailed statement. The case is being handled by the Knoxville FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.

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Vienna  - Vienna theatre artist Hubsi Kramar has been getting police protection after far-right politicians and tabloid media blasted his planned play about the incest case of Josef Fritzl.

Kramar, 59, defended himself in a press conference on Thursday, saying that his production about the man who imprisoned and raped his own daughter for 24 years would not be a comedy, but would satirize the "hypocritical" media coverage of the case.

"The play describes a certain process in Austria's mental state," Kramar said.