Brussels - Officials in Brussels said Monday they are confident that the United States has not abused its ability to access European banking records as part of its global fight against terrorism.

However, officials would not reveal how much data has been accessed by US investigators, nor would they provide examples of how such an arrangement has produced what they describe as "significant value in the fight against terrorism."

Brasilia  - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is scheduled to hold three meetings with US President Barack Obama in March and April, Lula's senior foreign policy advisor Marco Aurelio Garcia said Monday.

The first meeting is to take place in Washington on March 17, Garcia said in an interview with the Sao Paulo radio station, Eldorado.

The two leaders had decided on the meeting during a 25-minute phone conversation last month, Garcia said.

Tskhinvali, South Ossetia - The memory of war in this tiny patch of farm country sunk in the shadow of the Caucasus mountains is long and violent. But the raw anger among South Ossetians huddled amid the freezing, roofless ruins of the recent war in separatist province is sharpened against a new antagonist.

Europeans might be stunned today to find the pained outrage here targeted at its ceasefire monitors - part of an EU-brokered peace pact that ended the five days of fighting between Russian and Georgia over the region in August.

Brasilia - The referendum victory that enables Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stand for re-election in 2012 revealed that the country is "obviously divided," said a senior foreign policy advisor to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

In an interview with Sao Paulo radio station Eldorado on Monday, Marco Aurelio Garcia said that the fact that Chavez's proposal was passed in a referendum Sunday did not guarantee his re-election.

Harare  - The planned court appearance of detained Zimbabwean opposition politician Roy Bennett failed to happen Monday because of prosecution delays, his lawyer said.

Bennett, who was due to be sworn in later this week as deputy agriculture minister in the country's new unity government, had been expected to appear in court in the north-eastern city of Mutare to be formally charged with attempted terrorism.

But the prosecutor failed to arrive from Harare, where the investigating police officer had taken the docket, Bennett's lawyer said.

London/HongKong  - Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has spent more than 5 million US dollars on a luxury Hong Kong hideaway, a news report said Sunday.

The three-storey home at the JC Castle development in Hong Kong's Tai Po district was bought in June last year by a middle-man acting on behalf of Mugabe and his wife, the Sunday Times in London reported.

The newspaper speculated that the property may have been bought as a Far East "bolt-hole" for the dictator whose 30-year stranglehold power appears to be finally ending as his country sinks into economic and political chaos.