■ United Kingdom
Lord Archer released
Flamboyant British novelist and disgraced politician Jeffrey Archer was freed on parole yesterday after serving half of a four-year jail sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice. Archer, a best-selling author who rarely misses a chance to step into the limelight, welcomed an end to what he called "this unhappy period in my life" but said in a statement published before his release he would be giving no immediate interviews. A top Conservative politician when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and later made a lord, Archer was jailed for four years in 2001 for lying in a libel trial against a newspaper which said he had had sex with a prostitute. The case destroyed his political career and piled embarrassment on Britain's opposition Conservatives.
■ Canada
Murder inquiry expands
Police have expanded their investigation into the worst alleged serial killing in Canadian history on the eve of a preliminary hearing's expected conclusion. Robert William Pickton, 53, is accused of killing 15 women who were among 63 prostitutes and drug addicts missing from downtown Vancouver over the past 25 years. Despite police teams scouring a new site 112km east of Vancouver, officials gave no indication that the preliminary hearing would continue past yesterday's deadline. Early Sunday, members of the Missing Women's Task Force sealed off a slough adjacent to one of the region's major highways near the town of Mission. RCMP Corporal Catherine Galliford said evidence already found in the investigation led police to the new site.
■ Uganda
Idi Amin in a coma
Former dictator Idi Amin, who was accused of ordering the murder of tens of thousands of Ugandans in the 1970s, is in a Saudi hospital in a possibly critical coma, medical sources said on Sunday. "He is now in a vegetative state and could die at any time," a source at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah said. His health had been deteriorating and he went into a coma on Saturday, hospital sources said, adding that the former Ugandan president's family had been told he might not survive. Amin has lived in exile in Saudi Arabia since being ousted from his East African homeland in 1979.
■ Kenya
Air crash kills 12 tourists
A chartered aircraft carrying three generations of an American family to a game reserve plowed into Mount Kenya, killing all 12 tourists and the two South African pilots on board, officials said. The twin-engine Fairchild turboprop hit Point Lenana, the third-highest peak on Africa's second-highest mountain, as a cloudy sky was beginning to clear just before sunset Saturday, said Bongo Woodley, senior Kenya Wildlife Service warden in charge of Mount Kenya National Park.
Agencies
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