CAIRO, Egypt — Egyptian police turned water cannons on Sudanese war refugees and beat them with sticks today, brutally clearing out a squatters camp in a city park. At least 10 people were killed, the government said.

Hundreds of Sudanese have been living in the park since September to protest the U.N. refugee agency's refusal to consider them for refugee status. They want to be resettled in a third country, such as the United States or Britain, rather than go home after a peace deal ended the 21-year-long civil war in Sudan.

In a showdown played out during the first five hours of today, the protesters dismantled their plastic sheeting and cardboard, but most refused to leave on buses brought in to take them to camps elsewhere in Cairo.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea's parliament approved a government plan today to bring home one-third of the country's troops in Iraq but extended the overall deployment for another year.The assembly approved the plan in a 110-31 vote with 17 abstentions.The plan calls for the withdrawal of about 1,000 of the 3,200 South Korean military personnel who are helping rebuild a Kurdish area of northern Iraq.South Korea has more troops in Iraq than any coalition partner except Britain. The mission had been due to expire at the end of this year.The reduction will begin in the first half of next year, said Ahn Young-keun, a ruling Uri Party lawmaker.The government plan is partly in response to calls by lawmakers and citizens to reduce South Korea's troop level in Iraq as other U.S. allies pull out of the coalition or scale back their participation. Ukraine and Bulgaria announced this week that their soldiers had left Iraq.The deployment is unpopular among South Koreans worried about security concerns. In June 2004, Islamic insurgents beheaded a South Korean civilian working in Iraq after South Korea rejected demands to withdraw its troops.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — An international team agreed Thursday to review Iraq's parliamentary elections, a decision lauded by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups who have staged repeated protests around Iraq complaining of widespread fraud and intimidation.Meanwhile, The New York Times reported today that American commanders are planning to boost the number of soldiers advising Iraqi police commando units. The report, which cited an unidentified senior commander in Iraq, said the aim was to curtail abuse that Iraqi units are suspected of inflicting on Sunni Arabs.Gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shiite family near Latifiyah, a Sunni Arab-dominated town about 20 miles south of Baghdad.The decision by the International Mission for Iraqi Elections to send a team of assessors should help placate opposition complaints of ballot box rigging and mollify those groups who felt their views were not being heard, especially among hardline Sunni Arab parties."It is important that the Iraqi people have confidence in the election results and that the voting process, including the process for vote counting, is free and fair," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said.