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World News Quick Take

■ China
Five die in lab explosion
Five people were killed and two others injured, one critically, when a chemical laboratory exploded in east China, state media said yesterday. The accident occurred on Friday in a lab at the Jusheng Fluorine Chemical Corp in Zhejiang Province, Xinhua news agency said. The cause of the blast was being investigated. Jusheng, which mainly produces fluorine refrigerant, is a subsidiary of Juhua, the largest chemical enterprise in Zhejiang.

■ China
Leaking gas well capped
Engineers have capped a leaking gas well in southwest China that forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, the Xinhua news agency reported. The 3.4km-deep well, owned by China National Petroleum Corp, began leaking last Saturday, and was finally capped early on Friday, the official agency said. The leakage at the well in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, began during final tests before it was to have gone into production. Two earlier attempts to cap it failed on Monday and Wednesday. Xinhua said more than 10,000 people who lived within 1km of the well had had to leave home but should now be able to return.

■ China
Quake rattles Jilin
A moderate earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale shook northeast China, but there were no immediate reports of casualties, state media and local officials said yesterday. The epicenter of the quake, which hit at 8:23pm on Friday, was in Laoyingtai Village, Songyuan City, about 200km north of Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province, Xinhua news agency quoted local seismologists as saying.

■ Afghanistan
Gunmen murder lawmaker
Gunmen broke into the home of a local lawmaker in northern Afghanistan and killed him yesterday, the latest in a string of attacks against regional leaders, officials said. Sayed Sadeq, the speaker of the Tahhar provincial governing assembly, died in hospital after receiving multiple gunshots to his body, said Ghulam Hazarat, the deputy local police chief. He said it was not clear who was behind the killing and that an investigation had been launched. Sadeq was well respected in the region and was a supporter of the US-backed government.

■ Hong Kong
Chertoff visits port company
The US Homeland Security secretary yesterday toured a port operated by a company that's poised to win a US bid to screen shipping cargo for nuclear threats in the Bahamas. Michael Chertoff spent the morning at the port owned by the conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. The US government is close to awarding Hutchison a no-bid, US$6 million contract to help detect nuclear materials inside cargo passing through the port in Freeport, Bahamas. The contract represents the first time a foreign company will be involved in running US radiation-detection equipment at an overseas port without the presence of US Customs agents, which has worried some US lawmakers.

■ Australia
Lampoonery bites back
The biggest-selling national newspaper crudely lampooned Indonesia's president yesterday in the continuing furor over Canberra's decision to accept a group of Indonesians from the restive province of Papua as refugees. A cartoon in the Weekend Australian depicts Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as a male dog copulating with a concerned Papuan who is also represented as a dog. The smiling Yudhoyono, his tail wagging, says: "Don't take this the wrong way," above a caption that reads: "no offense intended." The work replies to a cartoon that appeared in an Indonesian newspaper this week that portrayed Prime Minister John Howard and his Foreign Minister Alexander Downer as two copulating dingoes.

■ Hong Kong
Mules case to begin
A sentencing hearing is to begin tomorrow for three Australians charged with smuggling heroin. The defendants, in custody since April 12 when they were arrested in a hotel room with 701g of heroin, have pleaded guilty to being smugglers, or "drug mules," who intended to carry heroin from Hong Kong to Sydney, Australia. The trio face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and a fine of HK$5 million (US$644,359), prosecutor Derek Lai said. The accused -- all from Sydney -- include Hutchinson Tran, an unemployed 21-year-old, and Rachel Ann Diaz, a 17-year-old hairstylist.

■ Indonesia
Bali puckers up for festival
About 300 people took part in an annual kissing festival in the Indonesian resort island of Bali, a report said on Friday. Mainly young men and women took part in the ritual, meant to ward off unexpected dangers, which was attended by about 2,000 people, the Detikcom news Web site said. The event in the main town Denpasar was traditionally a cheeks-only affair but lip-kissing has become the norm in recent years. Kadek Dedek Wirawan said he had taken part three times. "But only now I got to kiss lips," he told Detikcom.

■ Austria
Babies killer gets life
An Austrian woman was jailed for life for killing four of her babies after the tiny bodies were found entombed in buckets of concrete or wrapped in plastic bags in a freezer at her home, a court spokesman said on Friday. The woman, 33, from the southeastern city of Graz, was sentenced by Graz's provincial criminal court, the spokesman said, adding he could not give details. Her partner, who said he did not notice her pregnancies, was sentenced to 15 years in prison, he added.

■ Nigeria
`Take bribes but be fair'
Football referees can take bribes from clubs but should not allow them to influence their decisions on the pitch, a football official said on Friday. Fanny Amun, acting secretary-general of the Nigerian Football Association, said bribery was common in the game. "We know match officials are offered money or anything to influence matches and they can accept it," Amun said. Amun first made the statement earlier in the week to a football seminar in the capital Abuja, prompting protests from other officials. "Referees should only pretend to fall for the bait, but make sure the result doesn't favor those offering the bribe," Amun said.

■ Poland
Auschwitz may be renamed
Warsaw has asked the UN to change the title of the Auschwitz concentration camp to remind visitors that it was built and run by Nazi Germany. In a sign of acute historic sensitivities over the camp, where 1 million Jews died, Warsaw wants to change its official name to Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Polish government made the request to UNESCO, which listed Auschwitz as a world heritage site in 1979, after newspapers referred to the camp as Polish during the coverage of the 60th anniversary of its liberation. UNESCO will consider the name change at a world heritage committee meeting in Latvia in July.

■ Russia
Arms exports hit new high
President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that the nation's arms exports exceeded US$6 billion last year, setting a new post-Soviet record. "Another height has been cleared in Russian arms exports," Putin was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying. "The aggregate plan for 2005 was exceeded by 20 percent and delivery volumes exceeded US$6 billion. This is a record figure for recent times." While Putin said the customer base for Russian military hardware had expanded -- including a potentially major deal with Algeria -- its "main partners" were still China and India. Earlier military officials had said that together the two countries accounted for about 70 percent of arms exports.

■ Spain
Police seize assets
Police have confiscated jewels, art and property worth US$2.91 billion in an investigation into real-estate corruption in the glamour capital, Marbella. Earlier this week police arrested Marbella's mayor, Marisol Yague, along with 21 other officials, lawyers and businessmen allegedly involved in a shady network linked to the construction boom in the coastal city, in which about 30,000 illegal homes have been built. They are accused of bribery, misappropriation of public funds, influence-peddling and collusion to profit from inflating land prices, the interior ministry said.

■ United States
`Choking game' claims one
A student apparently hanged himself by accident while undertaking an activity known as the ``choking game,'' a university spokeswoman said. A staff member at a residence hall of West Virginia University found the body of 21-year-old Jonathan David Hansen hanging from a cord in his room on Wednesday, spokeswoman Becky Lofstead said on Friday. The object of the ``choking game'' is to deprive the brain of oxygen so one can feel a brief rush when the blood flow returns. The game -- also known as space monkey, flat-liner, fainting game and black out -- was responsible for more than 50 deaths last year and eight this year, according to the Stop The Choking Game Web site.

■ United States
Pentagon readies `big bang'
The Pentagon is preparing to set off a record-breaking bang, detonating 635 tonnes of high explosives and sending a mushroom cloud into the sky over the Nevada desert. The blast, on June 2, codenamed Divine Strake, is likely to be the biggest controlled conventional explosion in military history, experts said, and is designed to test the impact of bunker-busting bombs aimed at underground targets. "I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency said.

■ United States
Hal the coyote dies
Hal, the coyote who led park rangers and police officers on a two-day chase in Central Park last month, died on Thursday, moments before he was to be released in Putnam County. He was about a year old. The cause of death had not been determined, Gabrielle DeMarco, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said on Friday. Hal spent the last week of his life in the care of wildlife rehabilitators on Long Island.

■ United States
Power of prayer fails
A study of more than 1,800 patients who underwent heart bypass surgery has failed to show that prayers specially organized for their recovery had any impact, researchers said on Thursday. In fact, the study found some of the patients who knew they were being prayed for did worse than others who were only told they might be prayed for -- though those who did the study said they could not explain why. The patients in the study at six US hospitals included 604 who were actually prayed for after being told they might or might not be; another 597 patients who were not prayed for after being told they might or might not be; and a group of 601 who were prayed for and told they would be the subject of such prayer.

■ United States
Cocaine hidden in statues
Two men suspected of helping smuggle cocaine to New York from Mexico inside statues of the Virgin Mary were arrested on Thursday, authorities said. Peter Matheis, 52, and Rafael Serrano, 36, both Mexican nationals, were indicted in New York and Houston, respectively, on money-laundering and narcotics charges, along with six others arrested previously, the Drug Enforcement Administration said. The 0.91m statues of the Virgin Mary, filled with 110kg of cocaine, were seized in a Brooklyn warehouse as part of the police operation. The drug ring used the statues to smuggle cocaine worth millions of dollars, FBI agent John Gilbride said in a statement.

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