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World News Quick Take

■ Kazakhstan
Central bank can't spell
The central bank has misspelled the word "bank" on its new notes, officials said on Wednesday. The bank plans to put the misprinted notes -- worth 2,000 tenge (US$15) and 5,000 tenge -- into circulation next month and then gradually withdraw them to correct the spelling. The move has drawn the ire of politicians, who urged the bank to abandon the notes altogether. "The mistake ... is not just a spelling problem -- it has political undertones," a letter from members of parliament to President Nursultan Nazarbayev said.

■ Hong Kong
Parents jailed over killing
A Chinese man and his Japanese wife were jailed on Wednesday over the killing of their 10-year-old son, who suffocated after being locked in a suitcase for two hours. The child's mother, Koyo Takahashi, 34, and father, Chu Wing-hon, 49, admitted shutting the boy in a 1.2m by 0.6m suitcase as punishment for his "naughtiness." Chu received an 18-month sentence after admitting to manslaughter last month and Takahashi was jailed for two years. The court heard that despite the boy's complaints of feeling scared and sick while locked in the suitcase, his mother ignored him, believing he was lying. The boy slipped into a coma and died two days after he was unlocked from the case, the court heard.

■ Thailand
Peaceful solution promised
Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont said he would use peaceful means to resolve the Muslim insurgency in the country's south -- a clear reversal of the previous government's iron-fisted strategy. Surayud said he would reach out to all minority Muslims to end the separatist insurgency, which has claimed more than 1,700 lives since January 2004. He also said that the kingdom plans to work more closely with Malaysia, which he visited for a day on Wednesday, to solve the problem. "We will try to talk to a lot of people," Surayud said. "I told the Malaysian prime minister that I would talk to the Muslim leaders in the south, to the kids in schools. That's the way I am trying to present myself -- by way of talking."

■ Philippines
Four killed in pirate attack
Pirates attacked a group of armed fishermen in the south, triggering a gunbattle that left four dead, the military said yesterday. All of the dead were fishermen, and at least four pirates were wounded and managed to escape after the gunfight on Wednesday in Malabago Bay, about 790km southeast of Manila, said Brigadier General Raymundo Ferrer, a regional army commander. He said soldiers were sent to track down the attackers. The fishermen were members of a local militia that has been armed to fight off pirate attacks, which are common in the area, he said.

■ Vietnam
Miners died of suffocation
Four illegal hold miners in central Quang Nam Province suffocated in a shaft, probably killed by fumes from a diesel generator, an official said yesterday. The bodies of three brothers and another man, aged 25 to 42, were recovered on Tuesday from the 300m long tunnel in Tam Lanh Village, local official Pham Van Dung said. Fumes from the diesel-run generator used to run the drill may have caused the men to suffocate, he said, citing an initial police investigation. The tunnel was part of a 365-hectare mine the government already licensed to a joint venture between a local company and an Australian firm, Dung said.

■ France
Plane explodes after takeoff
A small plane exploded early yesterday soon after takeoff from the eastern city of Besancon, killing the two pilots and two surgeons who had been traveling to conduct a liver extraction operation, officials said. The plane crashed after the explosion just 300m from the end of the runway of the Besancon airport, according to the regional emergency situations department. The reason for the explosion was unclear. All four people aboard were killed, and the bodies were recovered. The two surgeons had been heading to a hospital in Amiens in northern France to remove a patient's liver for a transplant operation, the officials said.

■ South Africa
Thieves rob church
A gang of armed robbers held up a priest during a raid on a Roman Catholic cathedral in crime-ridden Johannesburg on Wednesday, making off with cash and jewelry. The four robbers who held up the priest and two women employees were unable to gain access to the safe, but then took whatever they could lay their hands on, the SAPA news agency reported. Johannesburg's Roman Catholic Archbishop Buti Tlhagale said in a statement that the robbery came days after various church leaders had pledged to work with their congregation to fight violence and crime.

■ Senegal
UN holds AIDS conference
Some 4.2 million children have been orphaned by AIDS in central and western Africa, UNICEF said on Wednesday at a conference aimed at promoting ways to deal with children affected by the virus. "The negative impact of HIV/AIDS on the lives of children is translated in a striking way by the growing number of children becoming orphans because of this disease," said Esther Guluma, UNICEF director for the west and central African region. "In West and Central Africa, more than 20 million children were orphaned with more than 4.2 million, 21 percent, orphaned because of AIDS," she said at the end of the conference.

■ France
Police raid housing project
More than 100 police raided a housing project northwest of Paris early yesterday and arrested seven people suspected of involvement in an attack last week that drew new attention to tensions in France's troubled suburbs. The seven arrested in the raid in Epinay-sur-Seine were suspected of having played a role in an attack on three police officers on Oct. 13, according to regional police. No other details of the raid were available. In last week's incident, one of the officers was hospitalized and required 30 stitches after being hit in the face by a rock. Police said he and two colleagues had responded to a call reporting the robbery of objects from cars.

■ United Kingdom
Moon waterless, study says
Hopes that the moon's south pole has a vast hoard of ice that could be used to establish a lunar colony are sadly unfounded, a new study said yesterday. In 1994, radar echoes sent back in an experiment involving a US orbiter called Clementine appeared to show that a treasure trove of frozen water lay below the dust in craters near the lunar south pole that were permanently shaded from the sun. But a paper published in the British science journal Nature yesterday by a US team said the Clementine data was misinterpreted.

■ Argentina
Casino won't pay winner
A casino outside Buenos Aires refuses to pay out US$12 million in winnings on a slot machine they say had a technical glitch, local press reported on Wednesday. "We will pay the maximum amount that can be won on that machine: 35,000 pesos" (US$11,000), Bingo casino manager Hector Luna said. Don't bet on it, said the winner, Veronica Baena, who already has a lawyer. "If the machine is broken, that is Bingo's problem," Guillermo Blouson, Baena's attorney, told the Buenos Aires daily. The machine in question has been placed under police surveillance inside the casino awaiting university experts who will inspect the software inside. Clarin recalled that in a similar case in 2001, a court ordered a casino to pay out US$26,000, reasoning that the machine's inner workings "are the responsibility of the casino."

■ Mexico
More heads found
Police on Wednesday found two human heads in a backpack in the Pacific state of Guerrero, the latest decapitation victims in a wave of violence in the country. Guerrero Attorney General Eduardo Murueta said the heads found in Altamirano, a city on the border with the state of Michoacan, had not yet been identified. He said authorities were investigating whether they belong to two men who went missing on Tuesday in Michoacan. Both Michoacan and Guerrero have been hit by a wave of violence including killings, beheadings and grenade attacks police have blamed on a turf war between rival drug gangs fighting over smuggling routes and street corner dealing. In the last few months, police have found more than a dozen deca-pitation victims in Guerrero, Michoacan, the border state of Baja California and Monterrey.

■ United States
Judo, not a hostage situation
Police responding to a caller who mistook a judo class training exercise for a hostage situation at a gymnasium stopped a passing car and pulled their guns on the driver, her four children, her fiance and a family friend. The telephone caller saw someone wearing a ski mask enter the class inside the Young Men's Christian Association on Oct. 11 with a toy gun and order everyone down on the floor, police Major James Thorburn said. The caller told police the gunman fled in a car. Police pulled the car over about a block from the YMCA. The occupants of the vehicle were ordered out at gunpoint, and some police officers reportedly used profanity. No one in the car was part of the class, and police didn't know why the caller thought the gunman had got in that vehicle.

■ United States
A hole in Picasso
Picasso's famed Dream painting turned into a nightmare for Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn when he accidentally gave the multimillion dollar canvas an elbow. Wynn had just finalized a US$139 million sale to another collector of his painting when he poked a finger-sized hole in the artwork while showing it to friends at his Las Vegas office a couple of weeks ago. Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron said Wynn had raised his hand to show the group something about Picasso's 1932 portrait of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter. "At that moment, his elbow crashed backward right through the canvas," Ephron wrote, noting that Wynn has retinitis pig-mentosa, an eye disease that damages peripheral vision. "Smack in the middle ... was a black hole the size of a silver dollar. `Oh shit,' he said. `Look what I've done. Thank goodness it was me.'"

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