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World News Quick Take

■ China
Mine blast kills 18
Eighteen miners have been confirmed dead after a gas blast ripped through a coal mine in China's southwest Chongqing municipality. Rescuers were still searching for one missing miner. Xinhua said 19 miners had been trapped by the blast, which occurred around 3pm on Thursday at the Sulongsi coal mine. The cause of the explosion was under investigation. China's mines are the deadliest in the world. More than 6,000 Chinese miners were killed in accidents and explosions last year.

■ Australia
Frog hospital closes
After six-and-a-half years of mending broken legs and treating disease, Australia's only frog hospital is closing its doors due to a lack of funding. Cairns Frog Hospital, which at times had as many as 200 sick amphibians in its care, has had to close down because of unsustainable costs. Founder Deborah Pergolotti said that the hospital had been hit by an increase in sick frogs being brought in and a reluctance by Australians to pay for the medical treatment, ranging US$20-30 to over US$100. The hospital, which she runs out of her two-bedroom house, could no longer afford the live insects for meals, vet fees and medicine. The hospital, which is part of the Frog Decline Reversal Project, received no government funding. She said frogs were not "iconic" Australian animals such as koalas or kangaroos, so "there may be an issue with frogs, because they are not warm and fuzzy."

■ New Zealand
Transplant goes wrong
Melanie Beck thought the kidney she gave for her fiance's transplant would save his life, but it carried an infection that killed him. She demanded answers from health officials, saying they should have detected the bug in pre-operation checks before her kidney was transplanted seven months ago into Jared Fitzgerald, who died on March 11. The Canterbury District Health Board has announced an inquiry into his death from a virus, which the chief medical officer Nigel Millar said could have been treated if it had been identified before the transplant. "They would have still done the transplant, but they would have done their treatment a lot differently," Beck said.

■ Japan
Old man strangles wife
An 80-year-old man was arrested yesterday for allegedly strangling his 73-year-old wife because he was upset that she cooked too many dishes for dinner. Masafumi Aoki, from Hokkaido, admitted "he had an argument with his wife over a trivial thing and strangled her to death in a fit of rage." He went to a local administrative office to ask for the cremation of her body but suddenly fell ill at the office. As he was being taken to a hospital, he told the emergency medical team about the body in his house.

■ Belgium
Man `loves' dogs too much
A man on trial for having sex with dogs claims he did it out of compassion for man's best friend, a Belgian paper said yesterday. Gazet Van Antwerpen said the 36-year old man in the eastern town of Genk told the court he had sex with dogs "out of love for animals," since a lot of them can't have sex, especially those locked up in refuges. The man could face six months in jail if convicted. He had worked in an animal refuge before and had also posted thousands of pictures on the Internet of himself having sex with dogs.

■ United States
Skin cancer protein found
US researchers have identified a protein that allows cancer in skin cells to spread, according to a study published in the US. The protein, collagen VII, a molecule normally playing an essential role in keeping skin intact, is also required by cancerous cells to spread, said Standford University researchers whose study appears in Science. The discovery opens the door to potential skin cancer treatments. Researchers studied 12 children suffering from recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, a rare skin disorder.

■ Russia
Assassination probed
Russian police yesterday interrogated a retired army officer over a dramatic roadside assassination attempt against national electricity chief Anatoly Chubais; newspapers speculated that powerful business enemies had aimed not to kill but intimidate him. Assailants on Thursday detonated a bomb and raked Chubais' armored car with automatic weapons fire as he was being driven to work from his home in an exclusive area west of Moscow. Chubais is one of the most hated figures in Russia due to his role as architect of the infamous 1990s privatization program that handed vast chunks of state assets to a handful of well-connected businessmen while most Russians remain mired in poverty.

■ Spain
Beaches littered with butts
Barcelona authorities vowed to tackle the city's dirty beaches after a study found that more than 10 million cigarette butts were discarded in the sand last season. A study by the city's Autonomous University estimated that between June and September last year that around 790,000 smokers, equivalent to one-third of beach users, had discarded a total of 10.5 million cigarette stubs. The study also revealed that 4,130m3 of waste was picked off the beaches last year, an increase of nearly 50 percent from the previous year. Forty city employees were delegated to publicize the problem by using loudspeakers to tell bathers who smoke to place their stubbed out cigarettes in new waste bins.

■ Kenya
Somali lawmakers brawl
Somali lawmakers-in-exile fought each other with clubs, chairs and walking sticks on Thursday after a hotly disputed vote rejecting the use of troops from neighboring countries in a force planned to secure a transitional government in Somalia. Some legislators were later seen with blood oozing from their heads as police confiscated clubs. Some of the lawmakers had reacted angrily to the speaker of parliament's decision to allow lawmakers to vote by a show of hands instead of a secret ballot. The contentious motion that was rejected would have allowed participation of troops from neighboring countries in a proposed regional peace support mission in Somalia.

■ United Kingdom
`Mercy killer' set free
A British man who admitted smothering his terminally ill 10-year-old son was set free on bail on Thursday after a jury failed to reach a verdict in his murder trial. Andrew Wragg, 37, had said he was not of sound mind when he killed his son Jacob, who suffered from the rare inherited condition Hunter's Syndrome. He denied murder but admitted manslaughter. The court heard during the trial that Wragg smothered Jacob after the boy's mother, Mary Wragg, left the boy alone in their house in Worthing, south of London. After killing the boy, Wragg dialled the emergency services to say he had carried out a "mercy killing," the prosecution said.

■ United Kingdom
Iraq soldier gets VC
Britain's highest military honor, the Victoria Cross, has been awarded for the first time in 23 years, to a soldier who saved the lives of 30 comrades in Iraq. Private Johnson Beharry, 25, is the first living soldier to receive the medal since 1969 when two Australians were given the award for bravery in Vietnam, the Guardian newspaper said. The official London Gazette cited a list of gallantry awards on Thursday. Beharry earned the Victoria Cross for two separate acts of bravery under fire in the town of al-Amarah, north of Basra last year. He is one of just 14 living recipients of the Victoria Cross, the Times newspaper reported. Only 1,355 have ever been awarded, most of them posthumously.

■ Saudi Arabia
`Gay wedding' busted
Saudi Arabian security forces have arrested 110 men at a "gay wedding" party in Jeddah, according to a Saudi online newspaper. Al-Wifaq, which has connections with the interior ministry, said the authorities had raided a wedding hall on Monday night after a tip-off and found the men -- all Saudis -- dancing and "behaving like women." Eighty men were later released, but 30 appeared in a Jeddah court on Wednesday to face charges, the paper said. Homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia and is punished by flogging, jail or death.

■ Chechnya
Envoy endorses successor
A Chechen rebel envoy said the successor to the late commander Aslan Maskhadov was committed to peace and was not an Islamic fundamentalist. Akhmed Zakayev strongly endorsed Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev and dismissed concerns that his appointment could undermine international support for the Chechen separatist movement. "It is a new name and therefore there are all kinds of rumors and supposition. But ... He is not an extremist. He is not a fundamentalist," Zakayev said on Thursday. Russian officials say Maskhadov was killed in a special forces operation in a Chechen village last week, when security forces found him in a bunker and threw in a grenade after he refused to surrender.

■ United States
Last effort to save woman
In a last-ditch effort to save Terri Schiavo's life, a US House committee planned to issue subpoenas yesterday to stop doctors from removing the severely brain-damaged woman's feeding tube. The extraor-dinary maneuver comes after the House and Senate failed to agree on legislation to keep the woman alive before leaving Washington for their spring holiday. Schiavo suffered severe brain damage in 1990 when her heart stopped because of a chemical imbalance, and court-appointed doctors say she is in a persistent vegetative state.

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