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World News Quick Take

■ Bangladesh
Bus plunge kills 11
At least 11 people were killed and 35 others injured when a bus skidded off a highway and fell into a ditch yesterday, police said. "The speeding bus hit a roadside tree and then fell into a ditch at Mandartala early in the morning," said a police officer at Jessore, 275km southwest of the capital Dhaka. The bus with some 50 passengers was heading to southern Bagerhat district town from Dhaka.

■ India
Record drug seizure made
The Narcotics Control Bureau seized 200kg of cocaine from a ship from South Africa in the largest illegal drugs' haul in the country, police said yesterday. The seizure was made from the cargo vessel, SL Voyager, at the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust near western Mumbai on Saturday, a narcotics' official said. The cocaine was estimated to be worth about 900 million rupees (US$19 million) in the local market. The consignment had been sent by an Ecuador-registered company to Mumbai-based OPM Trading Co, local media reported.

■ Indonesia
Bird flu toll rises to 37
World Health Organization (WHO) tests have confirmed Indonesia's 37th death from bird flu, a health ministry official said yesterday. The latest victim was a 15-year-old boy who died last week in the West Java capital of Bandung, said I Nyoman Kandun, director for the health ministry's communicable disease control center. "Yes, it's been confirmed," he told reporters. The WHO has now confirmed 37 human bird flu deaths in Indonesia -- the world's second highest toll after Vietnam, and the country with the most deaths this year worldwide. More than 120 people have died of bird flu around the world since late 2003, the vast majority of them in Asia..

■ China
Military plane crash kills 5
A military transport plane carrying 40 people crashed in eastern Anhui Province, the government said yesterday. A local official said at least five people were killed. Villagers described a chaotic crash scene, with bodies and body parts strewn across a mountain slope where the plane crashed and burned. The official Xinhua news agency said Saturday's crash was under investigation, citing a military staffer who's name was not given. An official at the Anhui provincial government office said the accident occurred at about 4pm in Yaocun, a village in Anhui's eastern Guangde County, and that five bodies had been recovered. Guangde, about 200km southwest of Shanghai, encompasses a handful of low mountain villages famous for producing bamboo furniture.

■ Japan
Mad cow goes on rampage
A cow being delivered to a slaughterhouse tried escape yesterday, leading nearly two dozen police on a 6km car chase through town and sending one man to the hospital. Footage of the wild escape, aired by public broadcaster NHK, showed the frenzied 730kg animal darting down a street hotly pursued by a stream of patrol cars. The three-year-old cow eventually crashed headfirst into a metal fence, fell down and died, but not before attacking a rendering plant worker who was trying to recapture the animal, Masashi Kitabayashi, a police official in the central town of Yakkaichi, said. The 56-year-old worker was still unconscious in hospital. Slaughterhouse workers took the cow's body away. "I don't know whether it will be processed into meat or not," Kitabayashi said.

■ United States
Spammer to pay US$1m
One of the world's most notorious spammers has settled lawsuits with the state of Texas and Microsoft Corp that cost him at least US$1 million, took away most of his assets and forced him to stop sending the nuisance e-mails. Ryan Pitylak, 24, who graduated from the University of Texas last month, has admitted sending 25 million e-mails every day at the height of his spamming operation in 2004. At one time, Pitylak was listed as the fourth-worst spammer in the world by the Spamhaus Project, a London-based international clearinghouse that tracks spammers.

■ Peru
Garcia on track to win
Peruvians looked set to elect former leader Alan Garcia by a narrow margin in a presidential runoff yesterday but with almost a tenth of voters undecided, pollsters gave ex-army nationalist Ollanta Humala an outside chance of victory. Following a campaign that included fights, egg-throwing and a shootout between rival supporters, voters must choose between Humala's promises of a revolution for the half of Peru's 27 million people who are poor and Garcia's pledges to improve on unprecedented economic growth since 2002.

■ Somalia
Islamic fighters make gains
A US-backed warlords alliance on Saturday lost territory to their Islamic rivals outside the lawless Somali capital as fierce fighting claimed at least least five lives and shattered a brief lull. The factions pounded each other with heavy machine guns and grenades in the village of El Arfid, about 20km north of Mogadishu, where the two sides have been battling for control of a key road, witnesses said.

■ Zimbabwe
Five killed in train collision
Five people were killed and 24 others injured when a freight train rear-ended a passenger train on Saturday in southern Zimbabwe, state television reported. "The derailment occurred after a goods train that was traveling from Rutenga to Gweru rammed into the back of a passenger train," the broadcaster said. Four of those killed in the accident were employees of National Railways of Zimbabwe, traveling on the freight train, while the fifth was a person on the passenger train, it said.

■ Switzerland
Corpses spark complaints
The clinic where dozens of people from many countries have been helped to die has a new problem: the neighbors are complaining that they are fed up with bodies being taken out of the apartment block, where the clinic is located, in the communal lift. The group Dignitas, which began to offering assisted suicide eight years ago, uses a flat in a building on the outskirts of Zurich. But residents of the apartment block say they have had enough of the bodies being taken down from the fourth floor in body bags in the lift.

■ United States
Customers at risk after theft
Thousands of Hotels.com customers may be at risk for identity theft after a notebook computer containing their credit card information was stolen from an auditor, Hotels.com spokesman said. The password-protected laptop belonging to an Ernst & Young auditor was taken in late February from a locked car, said the spokesman for Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com.

■ United Kingdom
Kids used as slave labor
Gangs of traffickers are bringing hundreds of children from Africa, Asia and eastern Europe into Britain every year to be used as slave labor, a newspaper reported yesterday. Traffickers are often able to lure the children away from their impoverished parents whom they convince to pay money to help find them better lives overseas and put them in a position to send money home, the Sunday Telegraph said. The victims, who are smuggled into Britain or brought in on false passports by adults posing as relatives, are put to work immediately, live in appalling conditions and are subjected to physical and sexual abuse, it said.

■ United States
Inmates plotted to kill kids
Two Florida jail inmates each face charges of conspiring to kill children who are scheduled to testify against them in separate cases. Daniel King, 25, offered someone US$5,000 to kidnap and kill a 5-year-old girl who accused him of forcing her to engage in a sex act, according to the Lake County Sheriff's Office. The other inmate, Jeffrey Roden, 36, wrote a letter to his father asking for money so he could hire a hit man to kill his girlfriend and her 4-year-old son, deputies said. The boy had accused Roden of beating him with a belt. King was charged on Thursday with solicitation to commit murder and solicitation to commit kidnapping. Roden was charged on Thursday with two counts of solicitation to commit murder.

■ United Kingdom
Cops probe `cash-for-asylum'
Police are investigating allegations relating to a large-scale "cash-for-asylum" racket among British Home Office immigration officials. Police are looking into claims that government officials are accepting a "going rate" of up to ?4,000 (US$7,500) in return for residency status. In the first indication of the extent of possible criminality, one London police officer described levels of corruption among elements of Home Office immigration staff as "endemic." Officers are currently conducting around 50 "live investigations" relating to corruption allegations involving Home Office staff, a proportion of which involve asylum applicants buying residency status to remain in Britain.

■ United States
Grandparents held over plot
A Miami couple have been charged with trying to hire a hit man to kill their daughter-in-law, granddaughter, and two step-grandchildren to prevent them from testifying at their son's rape trial. Florida police said that last week the couple went to a motel northwest of Orlando to meet a man they thought was the hit man but who was actually an undercover officer. The couple were charged with four counts each of criminal conspiracy to commit murder. Their 31-year-old son has been in jail since last November and is awaiting trial on charges of sexually assaulting his 10-year-old daughter and 16-year-old stepdaughter. The family members' names are being withheld to protect the children's identities.

■ United States
Gore looks to Green future
Former vice president Al Gore said, in remarks due to be broadcast yesterday, that he has abandoned his presidential ambitions. "I have no plans to be a candidate for president again," Gore said in an interview with ABC's This Week television program. Gore, who has just produced a documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, which details the effects of global warming, said he planned to use his time working on environmental issues.

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