■United States
Bush rewards Spain
President George W. Bush rewarded one of his most loyal supporters in the Iraq war, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, on Wednesday with a meeting in the Oval Office, a dinner at the White House and the inclusion of Batasuna, a radical Basque nationalist party, on the State Department list of international terrorist groups. Batasuna is allied with the violent separatist group ETA, and administration officials said on Wednesday that it had been responsible for more than 850 deaths in Spain. Aznar had requested the designation, and during a joint news conference in the White House on Wednesday, he profusely thanked the president for keeping his word. Neither leader mentioned an explicit quid pro quo, but neither had to. President Bush made it clear that good things were in store for Spain in exchange for its support of the US during the six-week American-led war.
■ United Kingdom
Townshend put on list
Pete Townshend, the rock guitarist and co-founder of the Who, was given a formal police caution and placed on an official register of sex offenders on Wednesday for having gained access to a pedophile Web site. Townshend, 57, was cleared of the more serious charge of being in possession of indecent pictures downloaded from the Internet, and the police said his name would be removed from the register after five years, barring any new incident.
■ Zimbabwe
Court makes a stand
Zimbabwe's highest court on Wednesday struck down sections of tough media legislation which had made it an offence to publish "falsehoods," after the government conceded the provisions were unconstitutional. The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change called the verdict a victory against a law it said was as "unconstitutional as it was primitively vindictive", while media groups said the entire package must be thrown out. "This was a symbolic victory for the media fraternity, but the fight is not over because the punitive nature of the whole legislation is frightening," said Andy Moyse, coordinator of the watchdog Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe.
■ Honduras
Honorary consul killed
Two gunmen wielding automatic weapons gunned down an honorary Belgian consul to Honduras late Wednesday as he steered his BMW through a downtown neighborhood in the country's second-largest city. Arnulfo Gutierrez's wife, Maria del Carmen Rapalo, was abducted 51 days ago and her kidnappers may have instructed the 62-year-old to meet them to discuss ransom demands in the area where he was shot, said Danilo Valladres, the case's lead investigator. The suspects ambushed Gutierrez's car, spraying it with bullets before fleeing the scene on foot and disappearing in a getaway car. They remained at large, Valladres said in a phone interview.
■ Iraq
Blogger alive and well
The enigmatic Iraqi blogger survived the US invasion and concluded: "War sucks big time." Salam Pax, pseudonym for an anonymous Iraqi who logged the prelude and start of the invasion but went offline on March 24 when the electricity went down, filed his first post-war report on Wednesday by e-mail to a skeptical fellow blogger.
Agencies
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