■ United Kingdom
Cancer researcher dies
Sir Richard Doll, the scientist who first established a link between smoking and lung cancer, died on Sunday, aged 92. He died in hospital in Oxford where he worked at the hospital's Imperial Cancer Research Center. Doll's work alongside Austin Bradford Hill during the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which they linked the rise in lung cancer to smoking, shocked the medical establishment and came to be regarded as his seminal work. "Sir Richard's enormous contribution to medicine cannot be understated. His pioneering epidemiological work on the link between smoking and cancer, cardiovascular disease and many other disorders, has led to the dramatic reduction in smoking rates over the past 50 years," said John Hood, vice-chancellor of Oxford University.
■ Colombia
Bogota to pay for coca crops
The government has offered to buy illegal drug crops from peasants in an effort to break the cocaine trade's stranglehold on violent rural areas. "We are going to offer ... to pay peasants who have coca to bring in," President Alvaro Uribe said on Saturday. He did not say how much the government would pay farmers to get out of the coca business. Peasants currently can get about US$800 for 1kg of coca paste from Marxist guerrillas.
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