World news quick take

■Pakistan
Mountaineers missing
A Spanish man and an Argentine woman have gone missing and are feared dead in northern Pakistan in a joint expedition to scale a Himalayan peak more than 8,000m high, a Pakistani official said Monday. They were part of a team trying to conquer the Gasherbrum I peak near Skardu, about 500km north of Islamabad, said Mohammed Hussein, deputy home secretary in Gilgit, a town in the region. He said there had been blizzards in the area since the two went missing over the weekend and that they were between 7,000m and 8,000m. The missing mountaineers were identified as Jose Manuel Buenaga Villanueva and Nancy Noemi Silvestrini.

■ Australia
Airline admits flight mistake
Qantas Airways admitted yesterday that its staff had failed to notice a woman who mistakenly took a plane from Los Angeles to Melbourne using a boarding pass for another airline's flight to Hong Kong. The error wasn't detected until shortly before the absent-minded passenger landed in Melbourne on Sunday, airline officials said, blaming a faulty computerized boarding system in Los Angeles airport. A Qantas spokeswoman said the passenger was holding a boarding pass for a Cathay Pacific flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong when she mistakenly boarded an earlier Qantas flight leaving from the same gate for Melbourne.

■ India
`Witch' beaten to death
A 60-year-old woman was allegedly beaten to death by relatives and neighbors who accused her of being a witch in a tribal-dominated state in eastern India, police said Monday. Malo Devi was killed Saturday night in Devagandha village after relatives accused her of practicing black magic, her son said in a complaint filed with the police. She was the third alleged witch to be killed in a week in Jharkhand state, a police officer said on condition of anonymity. Police suspect land-related disputes were the real reason for the killings, the officer said. Jharkhand tribes are matriarchal, so rights of inheritance and ownership of land are vested in women.

■ Japan
Cherry thieves on the run
Japanese police on the trail of crooks who stole cherries so pricey they are known as "red diamonds" have so far struck out -- but they did manage to nab pranksters who pinched bronze replicas of the fruit. Farmers have been sleeping out in their orchards in Yamagata, western Japan, since 1.3 tonnes of ripe Sato Nishiki cherries -- which sell for about US$130 per small box -- were spirited away by thieves in the dead of night. Police said yesterday they had arrested two youths who swiped a bunch of bronze cherries from a statue honoring the local fruit. "We arrested two 17-year-olds last night, one unemployed and one a construction worker," said a police spokesman. "As for the real thing -- the edible cherries -- we haven't sorted that out yet."

■ China
Mice kill woman
A woman has been bitten to death by mice in her home near Shanghai, a news report said yesterday. The 94-year-old woman had been ill for eight months at her home in a village in Chongming County when the mice attacked her as she lay helpless in bed, reported the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily. Her daughter came home from work to find her unconscious with her hands badly mauled and the teeth marks of mice clearly visible near the wounds and on other parts of the woman's body, the newspaper said.

■United States
`Beverly Hillbilly' star dies
Buddy Ebsen, a gangly and personable Ziegfeld song-and-dance man in the late 1920s who gained lasting fame on television as Davy Crockett's sidekick, a hillbilly in Beverly Hills and an aging private eye, died on Sunday in Torrance, California. He was 95 and lived in nearby Palos Verdes. For nine seasons, starting in 1962, the lanky, 1.9m Ebsen was the canny Jed Clampett, the patriarch of The Beverly Hillbillies. The show was initially ridiculed by many reviewers as the most abysmally lowbrow series in television history. But the slapstick exploits of Jed, Granny, Elly May and Jethro -- a cartoonlike backwoods family suddenly rolling in oil wealth -- proved a runaway hit, soaring to top place in the Nielsen ratings within five weeks of its debut. It remained among the 10 most popular shows through 1971.

■ United States
Mars mission begins
After nearly two weeks of delays, a rocket holding NASA's second Mars rover was launched on Monday into a night sky on a mission to study whether the planet ever had enough water to sustain life. The rover, Opportunity, lifted off in a cloud of steam aboard a Delta II Heavy rocket. The launch was postponed more than a half-dozen times.

■ Iraq
`Saddam tape' broadcast
A tape attributed to toppled Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and broadcast yesterday by a Lebanese television station called on Iraqis to unite and throw out the occupying forces from their country. The voice on the tape, which could not immediately be verified, told "Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Shiites, Sunnis, Muslims and Christians" that "your principal mission is to throw out the invaders by uniting your ranks." The speaker on the 14-minute tape said it had been recorded "inside Iraq," adding that "undercover action" was the best way to ensure the departure of the US and British troops from Iraq.

■ Bosnia-Herzegovina
Mass-grave bodies exhumed
Bosnian forensic experts said yesterday they have exhumed 32 bodies from a new mass grave discovered at the local cemetery in the eastern Bosnian Serb controlled town of Zvornik. Six mass graves containing some 100 bodies buried in plastic bags have been discovered in the last two weeks at the cemetery in Zvornik, according to the Bosnian State Commission on Missing Persons.

■ Germany
Leader's cocaine case ends
Prominent Frankfurt Jewish figure Michel Friedman announced yesterday that he is stepping down from all his public offices in the wake of a cocaine-possession affair, admitting that he had disappointed many people and apologizing to his girlfriend, television personality Baerbel Schaefer. Friedman, a lawyer, is vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and president the European Jewish Congress. He is also a well-known television talk show host and member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.

Agencies