World News Quick Take

■ Afghanistan
Aid workers killed
Four Afghan aid workers were killed in an ambush in eastern Afghanistan, aid officials said yesterday, announcing the latest of a bloody wave of attacks on aid workers, troops and government targets. Five employees of the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees were travelling by car in Ghazni province on Tuesday when they were attacked by a band of armed men, an aid official said. The ambush occurred on a road in the district of Ab Band, about 150km south of the capital Kabul. The unidentified assailants pulled the passengers out of the car, killing four of them. The fifth passenger escaped with injuries, the aid official said.

■ Cambodia
More temples discovered
Cambodian have uncovered seven ancient temples in the Siem Reap area that had been lost to the encroaching forest and years of civil war in the country, an official said yesterday. The most recently discovered temple, found in early September some 15km north of Angkor Wat, was a late-9th to early-10th century Brahman temple that was unrecorded in any known documents, the official said. "We only just learned about it from villagers who went deep into the jungle and found this temple covered by forest," said Nim Son, deputy chief of the Culture Ministry's Siem Reap-Angkor Heritage Office. "This is very important to show the world that there are so many other temples that still hide in the forest," he said.

■ South korea
Thousands catch `pinkeye'
A highly infectious eye disease has hit more than 66,000 South Koreans ahead of a long holiday beginning yesterday, and health officials feared it would spread further as millions of people jammed buses, trains and planes. A total of 19,746 new patients of the so-called "pinkeye" disease were reported on Tuesday, bringing the total number of patients to 66,700. The capital, Seoul, was the worst affected with 12,190 patients followed by Gangwon and Gyeonggi provinces which reported 8,012 and 7,003 cases. The disease is characterized by bloodshot, itchy eyes and is sometimes accompanied by muscular pain and headaches.

■ China
Floods sweep Wei valley
A major flood crest on northern China's swollen Wei River has safely passed downstream, but officials cautioned 4.9 million people affected by flooding and landslides that water levels remain high. Although the third major flood crest since August 24 had safely passed into the Yellow River, the Shaanxi provincial flood control headquarters warned that waters levels on the Wei at the Huaxian section had risen 80cm in recent days. So far, the worst flooding in the region in 20 years has killed at least 38 people. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated from the Wei River valley and its tributaries and some 46,000 homes have been destroyed.

■ Nepal
Rebels kill police, kids
Rebels a town in central Nepal, shooting to death three officers at a police station and two boys watching a soccer game at a school next-door, police said yesterday. At least six police officers were missing after the attack. They could be hiding in nearby forests or have been captured by the rebels, a police officer said on condition of anonymity. The attack occurred at Khaireni, about 120km west of the capital, Katmandu, on Tuesday.

■ United States
H-bomb father dies
Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, died a few days after suffering a stroke, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said in a statement Tuesday. Teller was 95. Teller died Tuesday at his home on the Stanford University campus, in Stanford, California, the laboratory said. His death "is a great loss for this laboratory and for the nation," the statement said. Teller worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, between 1943 and 1946 that developed the atomic bomb and then later worked on developing the hydrogen bomb. The scientist, of Jewish origin, had lived in the US since 1935, when he fled the the rise of the Nazi regime in Europe.

■ United states
Cuba travel ban lifted
The US House of Representatives defied a threatened presidential veto by moving to lift four-decade-old restrictions on travel to Cuba. Lawmakers also voted to lift the caps on money that can be sent to Cuban households. The 227 to 188 vote to open travel to Cuba was not as decisive as a similar vote last year, a reflection of the Castro government's crackdown on political dissidents in recent months. There has traditionally been support in the House for lifting the embargoes on trade and travel to Cuba, but moves in that direction have been thwarted either in the Senate or by the White House.

■ Germany
Hitler's filmmaker dies
The controversial German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose hypnotic depiction of Adolf Hitler's 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will, is renowned and reviled as the best propaganda film ever, has died at the age of 101. She died on Monday night at her home in the Bavarian lakeside town of Poecking. Riefenstahl, a confidante of both Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, had spent most of the past half century trying to shrug off her reputation as Hitler's favorite filmmaker, and the Third Reich's most gifted and glamorous female propagandist. Her films of the 1934 Nazi party rally and of the Berlin Olympics two years later brought her prewar acclaim and postwar infamy.

■ United states
Man ships self in box
A New York man came up with a novel -- and cheap -- way to visit his parents: hiding in a box that he mailed by air and flying halfway across the country for free. The man was arrested after he opened the box upon his arrival in front of his parents' home in DeSoto, Texas, the Dallas Morning News reported Tuesday. The delivery man had called police. An FBI spokesman said it was amazing that the man survived the trip, which took half a day. The FBI is investigating how the man managed to sneak in. While security is tight for passengers at airports, it's less stringent for freight.

■ United states
Lottery winner loses out
It's too late. It was a lottery ticket worth US$50 million and somebody had it in their pocket and didn't claim it. Florida lottery officials say the person who bought a quick pick ticket at a Miami-area food market for the March 12 draw let the 180-day deadline pass on Tuesday. "Somebody didn't get their US$50 million," lottery spokeswoman Sheila Griffin said. "There is no second chance." It was the largest of 19 unclaimed jackpots in the 15-year history of the Florida Lottery.

■ United States
Five more pilots barred
The US government has barred five more pilots from flying in the US because of security concerns, the Homeland Security Department said on Tuesday. Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border transportation, said the agency in mid-July directed the FBI and foreign terrorism task forces to review crew lists for foreign commercial flights using US airspace. The checks resulted in 16 hits that led to five pilots being denied permission to fly into the US. He did not say why the pilots were barred.

■ United states
`Full account' promised
The independent commission on Sept. 11 is marking the second anniversary of the attacks by promising "a full and complete accounting" of the events of that day. The 10-member, bipartisan commission is halfway through its 18-month inquiry into the causes and lessons of the terrorist attacks. It is reviewing millions of pages of government documents, many of them not available to a joint House-Senate committee that probed intelligence failures that led up to the attacks.

■ United states
Terror risk increased
More now think the war in Iraq has increased the risk of terrorism in the US than think it has reduced that risk, a major shift on this issue since mid-April, say new polls released almost two years after the Sept. 11 attacks. In April, almost six in 10 thought the war in Iraq had reduced the risk of terrorism in this country, twice the number who thought it made the risk higher. But in the ABC News poll, about half, 48 percent said the war increased the risk, while 40 percent said it reduced the risk.

■ Germany
Conspiracy theories popular
Conspiracy on the Sept. 11 attacks are gaining ground in Germany two years on, with books claiming that the US government was behind the atrocities climbing bestseller lists. Thanks to a handful of new "non-fiction" works in bookstores, wild accusations have gradually become part of public debate amid a sizeable minority in Germany, home to the so-called Hamburg cell that in 2001 produced three of the suicide hijackers. Although each book has a different take on the events of that day, they share the premise that the US government planned the kamikaze jet attacks or allowed them to happen to advance a radical foreign-policy agenda.

■ United Kingdom
Rally to honor hijackers
Extremist British Islamic group al-Muhajiroun is set to hold a rally in London today dedicated to the hijackers who killed more than 3,000 people in the US nearly two years ago, the London-based Observer newspaper said. The controversial conference -- to be held at Finsbury Park mosque in north London -- will be closely monitored by police and the security services and is expected to attract hundreds of young British Muslims, The Observer said. Al-Muhajiroun, who dubbed the hijackers "The Magnificent Nineteen," was investigated by police after senior figures admitted acting as "spiritual advisers" to two British suicide bombers who died in Israel earlier this year, The Observer said.