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■ Cambodia
Search on for boy's parents
A vendor who accepted a boy as collateral for three liters of gasoline last year has started searching for his parents, a newspaper reported yesterday. Chim Thy said she has been raising the nine-year-old boy, identified only as Dy, since taking him as a deposit in March last year when his uncle couldn't pay for the fuel, said the Kampuchea Thmey newspaper. The boy's uncle, Vy, was taking Dy to meet his father when he ran out of gas in Kampong Thom province. He told Chim Thy that he would leave Dy as collateral and pay her after picking up the boy's father.

■ Thailand
Playboys need not apply
The country's ruling party says it plans to reject prospective lawmakers who cheat on their wives. "We decided that party candidates must not have a reputation as a playboy or a record of having mistresses," Thai Rak Thai party spokesman Suranand Vejjajiva said yesterday. In Thai society it is common for married men to have mistresses. The idea of loyal, monogamous legislators was proposed by Somchai Sunthornwat, the chairman of Thai Rak Thai, or Thai Love Thai. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is "strongly supportive of this idea," Suranand said.

■ Hong Kong
Flag desecration goes to trial
Two pro-democracy activists illegally desecrated China's flag by stepping on it during a protest in Hong Kong, a police officer testified in court yesterday. Ng Kwok-hung and Lau San-ching are on trial for flag desecration during a March 4 demonstration outside a courthouse -- where Ng faced trial on the same charge after burning the Chinese flag on China's National Day last year. Desecration of the Chinese and Hong Kong flags was outlawed on July 1, 1997, the day Hong Kong returned from British to Chinese rule. The ban has become a test of how far people can go with free speech.

■ China
Earthquake hits Xinjiang
A strong earthquake rumbled through a swath of western China's mountainous Xinjiang region yesterday, killing at least 10 people and causing the collapse of hundreds of homes near the border with Kazakhstan, the government said. Thirty-four people were reported injured and more than 700 houses fell, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The 6.1-magnitude quake, in the sparsely populated Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, hit at 9:38am yesterday, Xinhua said. It said the quake was felt for many kilometers around. "I was just getting up out of bed, and everything in my house was rattling. The wall was vibrating,'' said a resident of Zhaosu County, where the quake hit hard. He identified himself only as Mr. Wu. "Fortunately, my house is made out of brick -- not wood and sand."

■ India
Voters go to the polls
Millions of voters began choosing four new state legislatures yesterday, with the Congress party expected to retain power in three of them despite India's traditional anti-incumbency sentiment and the popularity of the Hindu nationalist prime minister. About 94 million people were eligible to vote in the four states -- Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and New Delhi -- where voting was scheduled from 8am to 5pm in a prelude to national elections next year. Nearly 400,000 police officers and paramilitary soldiers were guarding 67,000 polling stations to prevent electoral fraud and clashes between rivals.

■ Turkey
Syria hands over suspects
Syria has handed over to Turkey 22 people suspected of involvement in deadly suicide attacks in Istanbul, Anatolian news agency reported on Sunday, a day after another suspect was charged with seeking to topple the state. The suspects fled Turkey after last month's bombings in which 61 people died, the state-run agency said, quoting Turkish security services. Several of those detained were believed to have links with Azad Ekinci, who investigators suspect was a key planner of the attacks, the agency added. Ekinci is believed to have escaped from Turkey.

■ United States
Bishops pan gay marriage
Catholic bishops in Massachusetts on Sunday strongly denounced gay marriages in a letter read at church services on the first weekend of advent. The bishops described as a "national tragedy" a recent court ruling by the state's top court, in which same-sex marriages would be permitted. The ruling undermined marriage, which was a gift from God and the foundation of family and society, the bishops said, urging that marriage should not be redefined to include single-sex relationships.
The bishops demanded an amendment to the Constitution which would stipulate that the term marriage be reserved for relationships between men and women.

■ Lithuania
Impeachment looms
Thousands of Lithuanians demonstrated in the capital on Sunday to demand the resignation of President Rolandas Paksas on the eve of a report expected to recommend impeachment in a corruption scandal. Demonstrators proceeded from Vilnius' central square towards the parliament in response to allegations that Paksas' office has links with the mafia. The protest
came after the head of the parliamentary committee probing the allegations, which have rocked the Baltic country six months before EU and NATO entry, said enough information had been received to lead to Paksas' impeachment when the committee published its findings yesterday.

■ United Kingdom
Irish PM optimistic on talks
Protestant hard-liners are right to criticize how Northern Ireland's previous power-sharing government worked and should negotiate to make the system work better next time, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said Sunday. He said the victory of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party in elections last week for the Northern Ireland Assembly doesn't spell the end of efforts to forge a stable Protestant-Catholic government for the British territory. He said he expected multiparty negotiations to start next month. Ahern said he agreed that Northern Ireland's four-party administration had been chronically unstable.

■ Georgia
Elections chief named
Georgia's parliament on Sunday confirmed as the new election commission chairman the head of an organization that conducted independent monitoring of the fraudulent parliament vote that led to President Eduard Shevardnadze's removal from office. Zurab Chiaberashvili was confirmed with only one deputy voting against him. One of his main tasks will be to prevent fraud in the Jan. 4 vote to find a replacement for Shevardnadze, who resigned last week after pressure from thousands of protesters angered by the Nov. 2 election.

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