■ Honduras
Camp opens for Iraq guards
A US company specializing in celebrity security and explosives handling has opened a training camp in Honduras for future security guards headed for Iraq. Ninety-seven Chileans are taking part in the exercises in a remote, mountainous site 60km northwest of the capital Tegucigalpa, Honduran newspaper La Tribuna reported on Monday, quoting Benjamin Canales, manager of Your Solutions. The US company has already sent 36 Hondurans to Iraq and is preparing to send 50 more, along with 95 people of other nationalities. The head of the joint chiefs of staff in Honduras, General Romeo Vasquez, said the armed forces would look into the US company's operations.
■ Mexico
Quake drill reminds city
Millions of Mexicans, from schoolchildren to office workers, poured out of buildings in the capital on Monday in an evacuation drill to mark 20 years since an earthquake killed thousands and changed the country. Some 2.6 million people took part in the exercise, city authorities said, emptying universities, tower blocks and schools in the most tremor-prone parts of the city, which sits on soft mud left over from a dried-up pre-Hispanic lake. Church bells chimed and the national flag flew at half-mast in the main Zocalo square downtown where thousands were crushed as hotels and housing blocks crumbled on Sept. 19, 1985. Mexico City holds smaller quake drills every year on the anniversary of the 1985 disaster.
■ Peru
Squatters at famed site
Around 30 families have pitched shacks on land supposedly off-limits around Peru's famous Nazca lines, a UN World Heritage Site, cultural officials said on Monday. The head of Peru's National Institute of Culture in the nearby town of Ica, Domingo Cabel, said that although the lines had been vandalized before, the invasion of squatters was unprecedented -- and hard to prevent. Cabel said the families invaded the area about two weeks ago but were about 30km from the most famous drawings -- which include a monkey with a spiral tail and a hummingbird. The gigantic figures were etched into a desert plain south of Lima possibly by the Nazca civilization, which lived between 200BC and 650AD.
■ Turkey
EU settles on basis for talks
The EU resolved its differences on Monday over how to respond to Turkey's continued refusal to recognize Cyprus, clearing the way for EU membership talks to start with the Muslim state on Oct. 3. In a draft declaration, the EU states told Ankara that it must recognize the Cypriot government, but allowed it to do so any time up to the time of actual accession -- a process that could take at least a decade.
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