The aim of an upcoming G20 meeting is to address global economic imbalances and not to dictate policy to any particular country, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said on Thursday.

Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors are to meet for the first time under the bloc's French presidency Friday and Saturday in Paris, aiming to hammer out common criteria for measuring global economic imbalances.

Ancient Britons used scooped-out human skulls as drinking cups in a mysterious ritual that also involved eating some of the flesh inside, scientists said Thursday.

The 14,700-year-old skulls, belonging to two adults and a child aged about three, were found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge, southwest England, the Natural History Museum in London said.

At least 12 people were injured and police fired warning shots during fierce clashes in Yemen's capital between anti-government protesters and regime loyalists on Thursday, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

About 2,000 protesters, mostly students, had just left Sanaa University headed for the central Tahrir Square when they ran into regime supporters and clashes broke out for a fifth straight day, the reporter said.

At least four people were killed in clashes with Libyan security forces, opposition websites and NGOs said on Thursday, as the country faced a nationwide "Day of Anger" called by cyber-activists.

The websites monitored in Cyprus and a Libyan rights group based in London said the clashes with demonstrators opposed to the regime of Libya's leader Moammer Gadhafi took place on Wednesday in the eastern town of al-Baida.

Riot police stormed through a Manama Square in the dark early Thursday firing rubber bullets and tear gas in a harsh crackdown on anti-regime protesters that left four dead, witnesses and opposition said.

Up to 95 protesters were wounded when police launched the operation in the iconic Pearl Square without warning at around 3.00 am (midnight GMT), sending protesters fleeing in panic, they said.

A series of blasts leveled arms depots at a Tanzanian army base and killed at least 17 people, Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda said Thursday, in the second such incident in two years.

The blasts, which the prime minister said also left at least 145 people wounded, went off inside the Gongo la Mboto army base in Dar al Salaam late Wednesday and destroyed several arms and ammunition depots.

Three Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli troops early on Thursday in an area near Gaza's northern border with Israel, officials on both sides said.

Adham Abu Selmiya, a spokesman for the Hamas-run emergency services, said the men died after being hit by a tank shell and machine gun fire in an area called Al-Waha which lies close to both the shore and the northern border with Israel.

Algeria said Wednesday it will lift by the end of February the state of emergency slapped on the country 19 years ago at the start of a decade-long bloody conflict with Islamist militants.

"The lifting of the state of emergency will take place before the end of the current month along with the announcement of several measures regarding housing, jobs and administration management," the state news agency APS quoted Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia as saying.

Leaked U.S. embassy cables carry U.S. suspicions that Hizbullah raised funds and maintained contacts among Chile's small community of Islamic fundamentalists.

An unclassified embassy cable dated February 27, 2006, and released Tuesday by WikiLeaks, said a "radical fundamentalist presence" was centered in the northern city of Iquique, and to a lesser degree in Santiago.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Hizbullah on Wednesday against any attack, after the group's leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah threatened to take over the Galilee in northern Israel.

"Nasrallah declared today that he will conquer the Galilee," said Netanyahu. "I have news for him. He won't."