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World News Quick Take

■ China
Bed shortage looms
Tens of thousands of tourists could find themselves without a bed in Beijing when the city hosts the 2008 summer Olympics, state media reported yesterday. The Chinese capital would be around 2.2 million hotel beds short of projected demand during the entire Games, Xinhua news agency said. To fill the gap, a tourism promotion conference would be held next April to attract international hotels and travel agencies to improve and expand accommodation, it said. "They could help to improve the services and the management of mid- and small- sized hotels in Beijing," an official with the Beijing tourism bureau said.

■ China
No marital sex, please!
A matchmaking bureau has been set up in eastern China offering platonic marriages to people who want a spouse but don't want the sex, a news report said yesterday. The service in Nanjing has been so successful it has attracted customers from hundreds of kilometers away in northern China, according to the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily. The director of the agency said the service was very popular with people who did not want to live alone but were put off marriage by the prospect of sex. "Because of physical or mental problems, some people need a type of no-sex marriage," the news-paper quoted him saying. "The agency is simply providing services for them."

■ Hong Kong
10-year-old terrors arrested
Twin brothers aged 10 have been arrested by police after holding up shops and terrorizing residents on a Hong Kong public housing estate, a news report said yesterday. The boys were arrested on Sunday after they started a fire by piling up newspapers and magazines and setting them alight in a playground in the city's Kwai Chung district. They have previously had scrapes with the law by holding up shops using toy guns, stealing supermarket trolleys and smashing windows and fire alarms on the Tai Wo Hau estate where they live. Neighbors are exasperated with the behavior of the twins, who live with their single mother and 11-year-old sister on the estate, the South China Morning Post reported.

■ Australia
Man found drifting on pole
An Australian fisherman who spent almost two days in shark-infested waters straddling a bamboo pole like a witch's broomstick was lucky to be alive, his rescuers said yesterday. David Richardson, 36, was fishing with his father on their trawler Star Mist II when the boat sank in rough seas late on Friday in waters off the Queensland state capital, Brisbane. Richard-son became separated from his father when the trawler went down and he clung to a bamboo pole about 5m long. He sat straddled over the bamboo pole for more than 36 hours, drifting about 102km before he was spotted on Sunday by another fisherman.

■ Philippines
Landslide kills seven
At least seven people were killed and two were missing after a fresh landslide hit the eastern Philippines yester-day, two weeks after back-to-back storms unleashed landslides and flooding that left nearly 900 dead and hundreds missing, officials said. Continuous rains around Tinambac town in Camarines Sur Province have loosened soil, causing it to collapse onto houses. At least three boys, ages 5 and 16, were among the seven dead. Two more people were missing and seven others were injured.

■ Spain
Soccer stadium evacuated
Some 70,000 spectators were evacuated from Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu Stadium in the 88th minute of a top-flight Spanish soccer game after a bomb threat was reported to a Basque newspaper. Officials said they acted on a "credible" threat but no device was found. Referee Lizondo Cortes halted Sunday evening's game after speaking with an official. With the score at 1-1 between Real Madrid and Real Sociedad, Cortes pointed the players -- including Madrid star striker David Beckham -- toward the tunnel. In an unusual move, fans were allowed to walk across the pitch to access exits more easily.

■ Brazil
PMDB to quit government
Brazil's biggest party voted to leave the governing coalition on Sunday in a move that could complicate President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's reform agenda and pressure him to give the centrist party extra government posts. The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or PMDB, called on all its members, including two Cabinet ministers, to quit Lula's center-left government and back their own candidate for Brazil's 2006 presidential election. PMDB members loyal to the government tried to block the votes in court on grounds they had been incorrectly convened, but a ruling in their favor was knocked down by govern-ment opponents.

■ United Kingdom
Migraines, strokes linked
People who have migraines are twice as likely to suffer a stroke as those who do not experience the throbbing headaches, researchers said on Sunday. Women who experience migraines and who are also on the pill are up to eight times more at risk of a stroke than those not taking the oral contraceptive, according to a review of studies by scientists in the US, Canada and Spain. The findings, published in the journal BMJ Online First, also suggest that those who suffer interrupted vision with their migraine are at slightly higher risk than those who do not -- 2.27 times as likely to have a stroke against 1.86.

■ Romania
Basescu ahead in polls
Reform candidate and Bucharest Mayor Traian Basescu was ahead in the Romanian presidential runoff, according to official partial results released early yesterday. Basescu had 51.75 percent of the vote, compared to Prime Minister Adrian Nastase's 48.25 based on 92.1 percent of the vote counted. He was 600,000 votes ahead, the Central Electoral Bureau said. Basescu's opposition Justice and Truth Alliance said that Basescu had 51.5 percent of the vote, compared with Nastase's 49.5 percent, according to a parallel count of ballots carried out by the opposition. The final tally was expected by tomorrow. The early results from Sunday's election sent hundreds of Basescu supporters onto the streets in cities around Romania.

■ Ireland
IRA asked for photos
Sinn Fein faced concerted pressure yesterday from the British and Irish govern-ments to deliver photographs of Irish Republican Army (IRA) disarmament, the issue most prominently blocking a new peace package for Northern Ireland. The IRA last week announced it was willing to scrap its remaining weapons stockpiles -- but only if both governments and Protestant leaders dropped their demands for the process to be photographed for the public. Sinn Fein insists that photos of IRA disarmament would be used to humiliate the secret group.

■ Iraq
Prisoners on hunger strike
More than 50 senior figures from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's former regime have begun a hunger strike in their US military jail in Baghdad, according to the lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat. Izzat, who represents the former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, said the protest began on Saturday against what the prisoners said was bad treatment and enforced solitary confine-ment. They were also opposed to being handed over to the Iraqi government for trial. "Instead they want a trial in an international court," Izzat said. He said the prisoners had been asked to testify against Saddam but had refused.

■ Canada
Court OKs gay marriage
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that gay marriage was constitutional, a landmark opinion allowing the federal government to call on parliament to legalize same-sex unions nationwide. Alberta Premier Ralph Klein has said he wants a national referendum on gay marriage. But Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin was cool to the idea of a national referen-dum on gay marriage and said parliament should decide the issue. "I think
that this is an issue that parliamentarians ought to decide," Martin said Sunday before addressing a brunch in Montreal. If approved by a majority of the House of Commons, as widely expected, Canada would become the third country -- along with Belgium and the Netherlands -- to embrace gay marriage.

■ Norway
Embassy move criticized
About 500 Norwegians staged a torchlight protest
on Sunday against a plan to move the US embassy from central Oslo to a leafy suburb where many residents fear they might get caught up in terror attacks. "The US embassy says that it's a terrorist target. It defies common sense to place it in a residential area," Margrethe Geelmuyden, an organizer of the protest representing 5,500 local households, told the crowd. Protesters planted flaming torches in the snow through the Huseby woods to mark the perimeter of the 4 hectare plot sold to Washington to build a new embassy about 5km from the city center.

■ United States
Bush and chimps don't mix
Artwork in an exhibition that drew thousands to New York's Chelsea Market for its opening last week was abruptly taken down over the weekend after the market's managers complained about a small portrait of US Presi-dent George W. Bush, which was fashioned from tiny images of chimpanzees. The piece was by Christopher Savido, a 23-year-old illustrator from Pittsburgh. Bucky Turco, publisher of Animal, said "When an organizer later saw it, "He flipped. If I didn't take the show down he was going to have me arrested, seize the art, and evict me from my office."

■ United States
Old man beats the sea
An 80-year-old diver spent 18 hours holding on to a buoy in the cold, rough waters of the Atlantic Ocean before a relative found him, ending an exhaustive search off the Florida Keys. Ignacio Siberio said he survived with the help of a wetsuit and instincts developed from more than 60 years of free diving and spear fishing. He did not require hospitalization, but was recovering in Tavernier. "I'm feeling OK, but I got back home pretty beaten up, because I was all night and all day in one spot without moving," Siberio told a reporter in a telephone interview.

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