Mogadishu - Five suicide bomb attacks, including one on an Ethiopian embassy and one on a United Nations compound, rocked Somalia Wednesday, witnesses and the UN said.

Witness Farhaan Omaye told Deutsche Presse Agentur dpa that three near-simultaneous bombs went off in in Hargeysa, in the breakaway northern state of Somaliland.

The Ethiopian embassy and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) compound were targeted, as was Somaliland's presidential palace.

Amman - A Jordanian delegation is expected to make efforts to mend diplomatic fences with Syria during a visit Wednesday.

The delegation of ranking Jordanian officials departed Wednesday to relay a message from King Abdullah II to the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on "issues of mutual interest," a royal court statement said.

Jordan's king is interested in improving ties with Damascus after strained relations over the past few years, analysts say. Part of the strain comes from Jordan's efforts to stay in the good graces of the United States, which has often pressured the country to take pro- Western stances that have, at times, hurt relations with Syria.

Paris - A trader believed to have been responsible for a loss of 751 million euros (954 million dollars) to the French bank Caisse d'Epargne has been taken into police custody, France Info radio reported on Wednesday.

No details were available regarding the trader's identity or the charges he may face.

The loss was reported by in mid-October and incurred the wrath of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who demanded that the bank's senior managers "take responsibility." As a result, Caisse d'Epargne head Charles Milhaud and two other highly placed executives resigned.

Berlin  - Germany offered cash aid to Islamabad on Wednesday after the earthquake in Pakistan.

Ludwigshafen, Germany - A takeover bid by BASF, the world's biggest chemicals company, for Ciba Holding of Switzerland has nearly won sufficient acceptance from Ciba shareholders, according to the German company Wednesday.

The 3.8-billion-euro (4.8-billion-dollar) bid expired Tuesday.

BASF said its provisional count showed it had acceptances for 66.665 per cent of free float Ciba stock, just short of the target of 66.67 per cent for the 50-Swiss-francs-per-voting-share bid to become binding.

The quota does not include stock held by Ciba itself or already in BASF ownership.

A Swiss bank, Vontobel, has said that including this additional stock would mean BASF had a grip on 69.382 per cent of Ciba.

Rome - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government won Wednesday final parliamentary approval for controversial education reforms, against which thousands of students are staging protests around the country.

The Italian Senate, the upper house of parliament, approved the decree by 162 votes for to 134 against with three abstentions.

News of the decree's approval was greeted with jeers of "Clowns! Clowns!," by students staging a sit-in outside the Senate's Palazzo Madama building in central Rome.

Protests are expected to culminate in a strike Thursday called by Italy's main labour unions.