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BBC world news, I'm Julia Candela.

Sudan has agreed in principle to allow a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force/ into its troubled Darfur region. The United Nations' Secretary General Kofi Annan said the size of the force had yet to be agreed, but he was optimistic at a finally agreement would be reached. From New York, here's our UN correspondent L T.

The final communiqué issued after the meeting notes that the Sudanese government want to consult on the size of the peacekeeping force. The UN suggested it should be 17,000-strong with 3,000 police officers, that's bigger than the Sudanese want. Then there's the tricky question of who controls a joint African Union-UN force. The Sudanese also want more time to consider this. The UN wants troops drawn from Africa as far as possible with backup and command and control structures provided by the UN. The Sudanese are likely to want to minimize the UN's role. President Bashir has been rejecting to a solely UN force on the grounds that it would be colonialist.

French Socialist Party officials say Segolene Royal will be the party's candidate for next year's presidential elections after reportedly scoring a convincing victory in the primary election. Though full results have yet to be released, officials said Ms. Royal had polled enough votes to secure the nomination outright, avoiding a second round in adding impetus to her campaign to become France's first female president. / reports from Paris.

All three socialist candidates appear/ confident as they votes in their own constituencies. The former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius said a vote for the political left was the only way to win the presidential election next year. Dominique Strauss-Kahn who has argued he is the only candidate capable of beating the right/ said he was confident and serene. When the favorite, Segolene Royal was asked whether she could avoid the second round by securing an overall majority, she joked "Let me consult my notes", a reference to criticism by her opponents of her performance during the campaign.

Democrats in the House of Representatives have unanimously confirmed Nancy Pelosi as the United States first woman speaker. Ms Pelosi will be the second in line to the presidency after Vice President Deck Chenny when she takes office in January. But Democrats in Congress have refused to endorse the candidate she favored for Deputy John Murtha. Instead, they voted in favored of Steny Hoyer from Maryland.

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/Iraqi government has issued an arrest warrant for a leading cleric from the country's minority Sunni community. The cleric, Harith al-Dhari who leads an influential Association of Muslim Scholars, is wanted for inciting terrorism and violence in Iraq. David N report from Baghdad.

Harith al-Dhari is head of Iraq's Association of Muslim Scholars; he has been an outspoken critic of the American-led occupation of Iraq and the government to the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The indictment was announced by the Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. He said that Al-Dhari has encouraged sectarian / violence. Harith al-Dhari is a Sunni, while both the prime minister and interior minister belong to the Shiite Tradition of Islam. Al-Dhari has opposed the government's officers of reconciliation for those who abandoned the insurgency and he was publicly criticized by the prime minister for his stumps early this week.

The Nobel Prize-winning American economist Milton Friedman has died in San Francisco. He was 94. Professor Friedman was best known for the economic theory known as monetarism which sees the supply of money rather than tax policy is the key to controlling inflation. His free market ideas had a strong influence on several governments including those of Ronald Reagon in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain. C looks back at his life.

Milton Friedman was the man who coined the phrase “there’s no such thing as a free lunch", the title of one of his many books. But he was also known as the high praise of monetarism. Although some of his theories were criticized as too simplistic, the governments of Ms. Thatcher and President Reagon were among those persuaded by Friedman's idea that the supply of money was the key factor in determining economic growth and the rate of inflation. Throughout his more than 30 years as a professor of economics at Chicago University, Milton Friedman was an unswerving champion of the free market. And he spoke with such devastating fluency that it was said he never lost at argument.

A Russian-born Isareli billionaire has offered to pay for a weekend away for nearly 2,000 residents of a southern Israeli town which has been a constant target of Palestinian rocket attacks. The businessman / said the people in / lived in permanent danger and he wished to express his solidarity with them. Several hundreds / residents have signed up for the weekend in hotels in the Red Sea resort of /.

BBC world news.