World News Quick Take

■ South Korea
Protesters duel over statue
South Korean activists rallied yesterday in a renewed campaign to demolish a statue of late US war hero Douglas MacArthur, as their opponents hurled eggs at them. Some 2,000 anti-US activists demanded the bronze statue of MacArthur be pulled down, describing the late general as "the chief of occupation forces" during the 1950-1953 Korean War. A few meters away 1,000 pro-MacArthur activists, including aged war veterans in uniform, hurled eggs and litter at the protesters whom they termed "pro-North Korean" forces. Some angry conservatives burned North Korean flags and blew whistles in protest at the anti-US rally but no serious violence erupted.

■ China
Manned space flight planned
China to launch its second manned space mission after the National Day holiday next month, a state-run newspaper said yesterday. The Beijing News, one of the most popular newspapers in the Chinese capital, said the launch will occur after the Oct. 1-7 holiday. It did not cite a source for its report. The spacecraft Shenzhou VI will be launched from the Jiuquan Space Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu Province, using a Long March 2F rocket, the report said. The space flight will involve two astronauts, as previously reported, and will last 119 hours or five days, the newspaper said.

■ Indonesia
Terror expert deported
A Singapore-based terrorism expert has been deported from Indonesia for conducting research in the troubled province of Maluku without a proper visa, a police spokesman said yesterday. Rohan Gunaratna, an associate professor at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore, was detained and questioned by police in the provincial capital Ambon on Sept. 2 after arriving from Seram Island where he had been conducting research, Colonel Saud Usman Nasution said. Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan national and author of Inside al-Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, told Singapore's Straits Times that he was studying Seram because it had become "one of the hubs of jihad" in Southeast Asia.

■ Malaysia
Police deny that rebels met
Malaysian have denied claims by the Thai defense minister that Islamic separatist rebels met on a resort island to plot attacks in Thailand's troubled south, a report said yesterday. "I want to categorically deny the allegation as there are no such activities on [Langkawi] island," Kedah state police chief Mohamed Zuber Shariff was quoted as saying by the Sunday Star newspaper. Thailand's Defense Minister General Thammarak Issarangkura Na Ayutthaya was quoted on Saturday as saying that "key" militants had met on Langkawi and that Thai intelligence would closely monitor activities in the area.

■ Indonesia
Quake panics Aceh residents
A strong earthquake rocked Indonesia's tsunami-battered Aceh Province, causing residents to flee their homes in panic, seismologists said yesterday. The magnitude-5.8 earthquake was centered under the Indian Ocean, about 34km northwest of the provincial capital Banda Aceh, said Sutiono, an official at the Jakarta office of the Meteorological and Geophysical Agency. The tremor occurred at 11:57pm at a depth of 33km beneath the Earth's surface, Sutiono added. Officials at the local geophysical office in Banda Aceh said the quake lasted about one minute.

■ Egypt
Hundreds protest elections
About opposition activists demonstrated against President Hosny Mubarak on Saturday, a day after he was declared the overwhelming victor in elections that extended his 24-year rule. Police kept close watch on the marchers, but did not intervene in as they wended their way through the middle-class, downtown shopping district for almost three hours, chanting slogans such as "There's the thief, there he is."

■ Italy
Immigrants' bodies found
The coastguard discovered the bodies of 12 African immigrants on a Sicilian beach yesterday. The bodies were discovered at Gela in the south of the island, close to a boat the immigrants were believed to have travelled in. Also yesterday the coastguard intercepted a boat carrying 100 illegal immigrants believed to be from Eritrea in eastern Africa. Many of the passengers were so weak they had to be hospitalized. In recent weeks more and more boats carrying African immigrants have reached the southern Italian coast.

■ United States
Red Cross needs volunteers
The American Red Cross said it needs 40,000 additional volunteers in the next few weeks to replace worn-out relief workers helping Hurricane Katrina victims. "This is a disaster of such scope and such significance that it is not going to go away in a few weeks or a few months," said Ken Degnan, public affairs specialist for the Red Cross. "We need more people." The relief agency is sheltering 160,000 survivors, has provided 6 million meals and is operating 675 shelters in 23 states, an effort that is taxing the 114-year-old organization. The agency is asking recruits to contact their local Red Cross, which will provide training in such fields as shelter management, public health and working through government bureaucracies set up to assist disaster victims.

■ Zimbabwe
Squatter camps resurface
Squatter are reappearing in the capital Harare four months after President Robert Mugabe's government launched a controversial blitz against illegal housing. Wood and plastic shacks are being built at the sites of houses demolished during Operation Restore Order, an urban clearance campaign launched in May that saw police raze shacks, cottages and flea markets deemed illegal. The UN estimates that around 700,000 people were left homeless and jobless by the operation. "I don't know where to go and I can't afford the high rentals," one squatter living in a shack in Harare said.

■ Switzerland
Animal torturers sought
Police they have few clues about a wave of sadistic attacks on farm animals after the gruesome discovery of the carcass of yet another victim -- a cow whose udder was cut off. The carcass found Friday in a meadow at Aeugst am Albis, near Zurich, brings to 47 the number of cases involving cattle, horses, sheep, rabbits and cats tortured to death in rural areas in the past four months, particularly in Basel, Aargau and Solothern. Police, who have been at pains to avoid dramatizing the incidents for fear of encouraging copycats, are attempting to establish if the Zurich case is linked with a series of attacks near the German border. The victims either died or had to be put down and some bore traces of bestiality, or sexual assault.