World News Quick Take

■ THAILAND
More males abused
Twice many Thai male students have experienced sexual abuse than their female counterparts, according to results of a recent survey published yesterday. The survey of at-risk sexual behavior, conducted by the National Institute of Development Administration at Thai high schools, revealed that 5.46 percent of the male students had encountered sexual abuse, twice the number of females reporting similar harassment, said the Nation newspaper. Most of the male respondents claimed to have been abused by male friends, while the females said they had been abused by family members or close friends.

■ AUSTRALIA
Wheat still welcome
Iraq reassured Australia that it has no plans to suspend Australian wheat sales, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday. Downer said Australian embassy officials in Baghdad had spoken to the Iraqi government after reports Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi wanted to suspend future wheat orders because of wheat exporter AWB Ltd's role in alleged kickbacks to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's regime. Downer said Australian officials had spoken to Chalabi, who denied any change to the treatment of Australian wheat.

■ PHILIPPINES
Fighting enters third day
Fierce between government troops and al-Qaeda-linked Muslim extremists entered its third day in the southern Philippines yesterday, as the death toll among soldiers rose to at least four with 21 others wounded, officials said. Sporadic fighting between Philippine marines and Abu Sayyaf gunmen began in a village outside Indanan town on Jolo island late on Friday after the guerrillas ambushed a marine patrol. Clashes have continued in the hinterland village of Buanza and the remote village of Candilamon after marines caught up with an undetermined number of gunmen on Saturday.

■ CHINA
Chemical plant explodes
A series of explosions rocked a chemical plant in northeastern China yesterday and 10,000 people were evacuated, state media said. No deaths were reported, but witnesses said dozens were hospitalized. The blasts occurred between 2pm and 3pm at the No. 101 Chemical Plant in Jilin City in China's northeast, the official Xinhua News Agency said. A man who answered the telephone at the No. 101 plant said that he didn't know if any workers were in the facility at the time of the explosions, and that he had no details on deaths and injuries. He refused to give his name. According to Xinhua, witnesses said dozens of people were hospitalized. "More than 10,000 residents have evacuated for fear of further explosions and pollution by chemical matters," Xinhua said.

■ SOUTH KOREA
North enters South's waters
Ten North Korean ships, including a patrol boat, briefly violated the western sea border with South Korea yesterday, South Korea's military said. The North's patrol boat crossed the frontier as it tried to usher back nine small boats that strayed into South Korean waters, the South's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. It wasn't clear why the nine boats crossed the border. The South Korean navy sent several warning messages and the North Korean patrol boat requested warning shots not be fired before returning to its waters 40 minutes later, the military said. The other boats returned after more than two hours.

■ SPAIN
Education plan protested
Several thousand people took to the streets of Madrid Saturday in protest at the Socialist government's plans to reform education and especially at the demotion of religion classes in schools. Grades in religion would no longer play a role in transferral to another class or in school diplomas. The rally organized by Catholic parents and teachers' associations was supported by the bishop's conference and the Spanish Opposition Party (PP). Organizers estimated the number of demonstrators at two million while the government spoke of 400,000 demonstrators, including six bishops.

■ LIBERIA
Rival asked to concede
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf called on her opponent, George Weah, to concede defeat, as latest results from the presidential runoff gave her an unbeatable lead. Her rival, a former soccer star, has alleged massive fraud and is contesting the ballot, though international observers have declared the vote was fair. "I just wish that Weah would accept the results, that is clearly from the choice of the people,'' she said on Saturday. With 99.3 percent of ballots counted, Johnson-Sirleaf had 59.6 percent, compared with Weah's 40.4 percent.

■ UNITED KINGDOM
Expert predicts tsunami
The odds of another ocean-wide tsunami striking in the next 70 years are just 2:1, and it would likely be caused by a submarine earthquake, such as the one that unleashed the devastating Dec. 26 tsunami, said Professor Bill McGuire, head of the Benfield Hazard Research Center at University College in London. Such an event could occur along any of a number of fault lines, he said, but noted that pressure was building near Tokyo. "The odds of another tsunami are probably even shorter than 2:1, because we had one in Chile in 1960, Alaska in 1964 and Sumatra last year. So that's three in 44 years," he said. However, he conceded that disaster prediction was "an imprecise science."

■ RUSSIA
Forces clash with militants
Security clashed with suspected militants holed up in houses in Chechnya and a restive region nearby on Saturday, killing three and detaining two others in separate operations in Russia's turbulent North Caucasus. A roadside bomb blast killed two Russian police and wounded five others in Chechnya. Earlier Saturday, authorities in Kabardino-Balkariya found a hide-out and weapons cache they believed was used by militants involved in the Nalchik attack, which left 139 people dead.

■ UNITED STATES
Space station fed live tunes
It was Good Day Sunshine for the international space station crew yesterday. NASA astronaut Bill McArthur and Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev were treated to a live wake-up call of the Beatles classic in a first ever concert linkup to the space station. On Earth, Sir Paul McCartney performed the hit and another song, English Tea, on Saturday before a crowd in Anaheim. The show was beamed to the space station crew 354km above the Earth. McArthur and Tokarev bobbed up and down and sipped from squeeze pouches through the show; McArthur did a couple of zero-gravity flips. McCartney came up with the idea after learning that NASA used Good Day Sunshine to wake up the Space Shuttle Discovery astronauts in August with word that conditions were favorable to return to Earth.

■ UNITED STATES
B5 concert ends in chaos
Police down a suburban shopping mall for several hours after screaming fans of the boy band B5 rushed the stage during a free concert. Five people suffered minor injuries, police said on Saturday. More than 2,000 fans, mostly teenage girls, had converged on Brookdale Center mall for the show. The band had only made it to the second song when chaos broke out and girls began rushing the stage. "It just seemed like a girl frenzy," said Christopher Taykalo of Radio Disney. Seventy officers from 23 area communities responded to the chaos.

■ UNITED STATES
Man crashes into court
Police a man after he crashed a truck into a downtown courthouse on Saturday, ending a pursuit that began when he allegedly set fire to several squad cars in a nearby town and shot at an officer who chased him. The man, identified as Christopher Lee Millis, 37, of Oregon,. drove the pickup through the glass double doors of the Marion County Courthouse and hid inside the building for about three hours, setting at least one fire before police tracked him down in a stairwell, police captain Jeff Kuhns said. He was in surgery on Saturday afternoon, officials said.

■ CANADA
Most polled dislike Bush
Nearly three out of four Canadians have an unfavorable view of US President George W. Bush, and 38 percent consider him more dangerous than al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, according to a new poll. However, the US president's low popularity in Canada does not translate into a general dislike of the country's southern neighbor. According to the poll published Saturday by the National Post, 68 percent of Canadians have a favorable opinion of the US generally. The poll late last month of 1,016 Canadians was conducted by the Innovative Research Group on behalf of the Dominion Institute and the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute.

■ RUSSIA
Lenin burial plan opposed
The Communist Party began gathering signatures on Saturday to protest calls to bury the late revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, whose body has been on display in a Red Square mausoleum since 1924. In what appeared to be a Kremlin attempt to gauge public reaction to the divisive issue, a regional envoy of President Vladimir Putin said in September that Lenin's body should be taken from its Red Square tomb and buried in a cemetery along with the remains of other Bolshevik dignitaries. But Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov warned that his party would stage a massive civil disobedience action if authorities tried to remove the body from the mausoleum.

■ UNITED KINGDOM
Man thought to beat HIV
A British man is believed to have become the first person in the world to get rid of the HIV virus, newspaper reports said yesterday. Andrew Stimpson, 25, was diagnosed as HIV-positive in August 2002. However, tests 14 months later showed that the virus had completely gone from his body, despite taking no medication to combat it. His doctors are adamant there were no mix-ups with his tests and the sandwich maker will now offer his body for medical research to help doctors in their quest to find a cure for HIV, which leads to full-blown AIDS. Stimpson was all the more surprised given that on hearing he had tested HIV positive, he gave up safe sex with his infected boyfriend, 44-year-old Juan Gomez.