World Watch

Bujumbura 
Rebel forces opposed to the government of Pierre Buyoya launched a series of rocket attacks on the National University of Burundi. Students and lecturers fled the campus, which has been temporarily closed.

Cambridge 
Actress Jane Fonda is to donate $12.5 million (£8.5 million) to Harvard University's school of education to create a research centre that will concentrate on the influence of gender on development and learning.

New York 
The presidents of Columbia and New York universities are to resign next year. Columbia's George Rupp and NYU's L. Jay Oliva both plan to quit.

Beijing 
China's ministry of education is to cut the number of students admitted to university by recommendation from 20,000 to 5,000 a year. The ministry said some high schools had turned the recommendation into a privilege for children of faculty staff and party officials.

Kiev 
Ukrainian students will today try to prevent president Leonid Kuchma, whom some have implicated in the murder of a whistleblowing journalist, from laying flowers at the statue of Ukrainian poet and hero Taras Shevchenko.

Johannesburg 
The student representative council at South Africa's University of Wi****ersrand were due to take public HIV tests yesterday. The 15 aim to encourage others to do the same.

Stockholm 
The Swedish government is giving SEK4 million (£282,625) to the Baltic University programme, a network of 170 institutions from 14 countries bordering the Baltic Sea.

Baku 
Rafiq Feyzullayev, a former Azerbaijani minister of education, has been sentenced to 11 years' imprisonment for extorting 1.5 billion manats (£224,800) while he was vice-president of the academy of sciences, on the pretext that he was going to found a private university.

St Petersburg 
Vladimir Troyan, pro-rector of St Petersburg University, has predicted that cuts in spending may reduce the number of universities in the country to "fewer than 25". There are currently 25 in St Petersburg alone.