World News Quick Take

■ China
BBC program censored
The British Broadcasting Corp's China Week didn't sit well with Chinese censors. Transmissions of the BBC World channel's weeklong series of China-themed programs to hotels and apartment compounds for foreigners were repeatedly blocked yesterday during reports on politics and other sensitive issues. A story about the restive Muslim Uighur ethnic group in China's far west was cut off after just seconds. The screen went black after a BBC correspondent said, "But the Uighur people have little affection for their Chinese masters." China closely monitors foreign reports on politics, religion, and material deemed too sensitive is routinely blacked out.

■ Australia
Debt repayment suspended
Canberra agreed to suspend debt repayments this year for countries hit by the devastating Dec. 26 tsunami the government announced yesterday. The government of Prime Minister John Howard already has pledged more than 1 billion Australian dollars (US$789 million) in post-tsunami aid, with the vast majority of the money going to its northern neighbor Indonesia, which bore the brunt of the magnitude 9 earthquake and the killer waves it spawned. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, Canberra said that debt relief was not the right way to offer assistance and instead offered its biggest ever overseas aid package in the form of low interest loans and grants.

■ Hong Kong
Women duped out of meals
A dinner-date Romeo wooed lonely Hong Kong women over the Internet, then took them for expensive meals and fled, leaving them to pay the bills, a news report said yesterday. He took them out for lavish dinners, then asked to use their cellphones to make a business call and fled shortly before the bill was due to arrive, the South China Morning Post reported. He ran up a US$900 bill eating abalone, lobster and shark fin soup with a woman he met through an Internet chat room late last month, the newspaper said.

■ Pakistan
Musharraf to head to India
President General Pervez Musharraf will travel to India after accepting the Indian premier's invitation to watch a cricket match between the two nations, a Foreign Ministry official said yesterday, raising hopes for sustained peace in South Asia. "He has accepted the invitation," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity. He said Musharraf has not yet decided which match he would attend. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the lower house of India's parliament on Thursday that he had invited Musharraf, a move officials say could help accelerate the peace process started by the nuclear-armed rivals more than a year ago.

■ Belgium
Iranians stage sit-in
A sit-in on board a Lufthansa plane by 56 Iranian monarchist protesters ended peacefully at Brussels airport yesterday as police escorted them all off the aircraft. "We want the European Union to remove the Islamic leaders from Iran," Armin Atshgar, one of the protesters, told reporters by cellphone during the sit-in. At one point in the night police boarded and moved the Boeing 737 after the unarmed men and women refused to disembark in a protest against Iran's Islamic government. All 56 protesters were eventually persuaded to walk off the plane into the terminal building. The protesters faced only "administrative arrest."

■ United States
Iran strategy agreed upon
The US and Europe have agreed on a joint approach in negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, with Washington agreeing to offer modest economic incentives and Europe to take the issue to the UN Security Council if all else fails. The details of the agreement were worked out with British, French and German officials. The US incentives -- support for Iran's entry into the WTO and selling Iran spare parts for its ageing commercial airliners -- would go into effect only if Iran agreed to permanently halt uranium enrichment at its nuclear plants. The US does not plan to join the talks with Iran directly, leaving that to the Europeans.

■ United Kingdom
IRA allowance stripped
British on Thursday stripped their four Sinn Fein colleagues of their annual allowances after the party's military wing, the Irish Republican Army, was blamed for crimes in Northern Ireland. Members of parliament agreed without a vote to a year-long suspension of the taxpayer-funded benefits such as staff salaries and travel costs which amount to a total of around ?440,000 pounds (US$846,000 dollars). But a cross-party bid to permanently expel the four from their Westminster offices and bar them from using parliamentary facilities was rejected.

■ United States
Clinton has more surgery
Surgeons removed fluid and scar tissue from Bill Clinton's chest cavity Thursday, cleaning up complications from the former president's heart bypass operation of six months ago. Clinton was "awake and resting comfortably" after four hours of surgery, said Herbert Pardes, president of Columbia University Medical Center. "We expect Mr. Clinton to be walking" within 24 hours. Pardes said Clinton, 58, was expected to spend three to 10 more days in the hospital. A tube to drain fluid from the left lung will be removed in two to five days.

■ Spain
Kasparov retires
Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked chess player for the past 20 years, announced his retirement from the professional circuit. The 41-year-old Russian made the announcement Thursday in Linares, Spain, which hosts a prestigious tournament every year. He said he would continue to play chess, write books about it and take part in tournaments, such as so-called knockout events in which he plays many opponents at once, or in speed-chess games. "It is a hard decision to make because I have reached the top, thanks to my passion and love for chess," Kasparov said. He said he also wanted to get active in politics in Russia denouncing President Vladimir Putin as a "dictator."

■ United States
Bush sparks roadrage
A man apparently enraged by a campaign sticker for US President George W. Bush on a woman's sport utility vehicle in Tampa, Florida, chased her for kilometers and tried to run her off the road while holding up an anti-Bush sign. Nathan Alan Winkler, 31, was freed on US$2,000 bail early Wednesday on a charge of aggravated stalking. Winkler told police he got upset with the woman, Michelle Fernandez, 35, after she made an obscene gesture. Police said that as Winkler chased the woman's vehicle, he held up a small sign that read: "Never Forget Bush's Illegal War Murdered Thousands in Iraq."

■ United States
Killing suspect identified
A man who filed bizarre, rambling lawsuits over his cancer treatment and shot himself to death during a traffic stop appears to be the lone killer of a federal judge's mother and husband, Chicago police said on Thursday. DNA on a cigarette butt found after the killings matches that of Chicago electrician Bart Ross, who claimed responsibility for the slayings in a suicide note, authorities said. Police Superintendent Phil Cline said Ross also fit a witness description of a man seen leaving Judge Joan Lefkow's home the day of the killings. Ross, 57, committed suicide Wednesday outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after a police officer pulled him over because of broken taillights on his van.

■ United States
Two convicted of funding
A Yemeni sheik and his assistant were convicted of plotting to channel money to al-Qaeda and Hamas. Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan Al-Moayad and Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed were found guilty on all but two of the 10 charges in an indictment that accused them of vital roles in a terror-funding network that stretched from Brooklyn to Yemen. Meeting with FBI informants in a Frankfurt, Germany, hotel room, the men were secretly recorded promising to funnel more than US$2 million to Hamas.

■ Russia
Chechens get new leader
The underground separatist movement in Chechnya said on Thursday that it had appointed a little-known fighter and religious judge as successor to Aslan Maskhadov, the rebel leader who was killed earlier this week. The announcement that Abdul Khalim Saidullayev would succeed Maskhadov dominated the news, drawing perplexed and sneering reactions from Russian officials and the Kremlin-installed government in Chechnya. Saidullayev, an Islamic judge who was said to have once been the host of a religious television program in Grozny, the Chechen capital, had been unknown as a rebel.

■ France
Concorde crash probed
A French magistrate formally placed Continental Airlines under investigation for the suspected role played by one of the US carrier's jets in the crash of the supersonic Concorde in July 2000. It was the first time that French judicial authorities have formally opened a case in the Concorde crash that killed 113 people. Two probes by experts -- including one by the prosecutors' office -- pointed to a titanium strip from a Continental jet as the source of the disaster. French investigating judge Christophe Regnard on Thursday placed Continental under investigation -- a step short of being formally charged -- for manslaughter and involuntary injury, judicial officials said. The Houston-based carrier expressed confidence that it would be exonerated.