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World News Quick Take

■ Australia
Truck driver arrested
Police have arrested a truck driver involved in a crash with one of the nation's most popular tourist trains, the Ghan, at an outback highway crossing. The train's two locomotives and 11 carriages skidded off the tracks on Tuesday after smashing into the truck at a road crossing. Of the train's 82 passengers and crew, two were taken to hospital for minor injuries. The truck driver was also taken to the Royal Darwin Hospital along with his 50-year-old female passenger.

■ China
Dinosaur eggs investigated
Authorities are investigating the auction in Los Angeles of fossilized dinosaur eggs said to be from China and might ask for them to be returned, said a Foreign Ministry spokesman quoted yesterday by a state news agency. "The Chinese government attaches great importance to the sale and is conducting an investigation into it," a ministry spokesman said. The unusually well-preserved 65 million-year-old nest containing 22 fossilized raptoid eggs was sold on Dec. 4 for nearly US$420,000.

■ India
HIV numbers possibly lower
The number of people living with HIV could be lower than government estimates, research released yesterday said. Scientists who studied the prevalence of the virus that causes AIDS in a district in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh -- the state which has the highest HIV rate -- found it was less than half the government's figure. Instead of 112,600 HIV cases in the district of Guntur, Lalit Dandona, of the Administrative Staff College of India, estimates the number is about 45,900. "The official method in India leads to a gross overestimation of the HIV burden in this district," Dandona said.

■ Philippines
Marine to stay in jail
A court yesterday rejected the US government's bid for temporary custody of a marine jailed for 40 years for raping a local woman, officials said. Lance Corporal Daniel Smith has been held at a Manila jail since the verdict was handed down on Dec. 4. Three other US marines were acquitted in the case. The US embassy has argued the detention violates a treaty that calls for it to be granted custody of military personnel accused or convicted of violating the country's laws until the detainee has exhausted all legal appeals. Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez said Manila was in consultations with the US embassy regarding the court's custody ruling.

■ Australia
Snake in the toilet
A wildlife worker pulled a 2m-long python from a septic tank yesterday after a plumber found it hiding in a domestic toilet, officials said. Peter Phillips, of the Northern Territory's Parks and Wildlife Service, was called to remove the snake after a plumber fixing a blocked toilet discovered it curled in the pipes. "The ... resident originally called a plumber because her toilet was blocked," Phillips said in a statement released by the Northern Territory government. "I arrived to see a large python head peering out of the toilet bowl," he said. Phillips removed the snake, which is indigenous to Australia, from the septic tank because it had grown too big to be pulled straight from the toilet.

■ South Korea
US military move delayed
A project to move the US military headquarters out of the capital Seoul is being delayed and unlikely to meet its target date, it was reported yesterday. It was agreed in 2004 to relocate the US' military headquarters from Seoul and some other bases to Pyeongtaek, about 65km south of Seoul, by 2008. The project was a hot issue earlier this year when anti-US activists and some residents in the new base area held a series of violent protests to block the move. "South Korea and the US all acknowledge that it is practically difficult to realize the initial project schedule of completing the relocation by 2008," the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

■ India
Water tank protest over
Hundreds of cotton farmers who had threatened to jump off towering water tanks in the western state of Maharashtra withdrew their protests after the government promised to address their debt problems. "They have begun to come down after the deputy chief minister promised that the government would would look into their demands," senior police officer S.P.S. Yadav told reporters yesterday. Local legislator Bacchu Kadu organized the "water tank" protest in the state's cotton-growing Vidarbha region on Tuesday to demand loan waivers from the government.

■ China
Free rural schooling
The government will waive tuition fees next year for 150 million rural students in a bid to stem the yawning wealth gap between the affluent coast and the impoverished countryside. Students would be exempt from tuition and "incidental fees" over the course of their nine-year compulsory education starting from next year's spring semester, a move that would cost 15 billion yuan (US$1.92 billion) per year, the China Daily said, citing the Ministry of Education. The waiver would not apply to children of rural migrant workers who had moved to cities to look for work.

■ United States
Green Lantern' creator dies
Martin Nodell, the creator of Green Lantern, the comic book superhero, has died aged 91. Nodell died on Saturday of natural causes, his son said on Tuesday. The first Green Lantern appearance came in 1940 in an eight-page story included in a 68-page comic book featuring other characters. After that, he got his own series and joined Superman, Batman and Captain America as other popular comic book characters in the "Golden Age" of the 1940s.

■ Ivory Coast
Armed forces coup claim
The country's armed forces said on Tuesday they had evidence a group of soldiers and civilians were plotting to assassinate the West African state's president and several top military officials. They said the planned coup, scheduled to take place this week, was masterminded by a militant for an unnamed political party, which was currently protecting the individual. A spokesman said the army possessed "irrefutable proof" that a coup was being prepared. Foreign diplomats were dismissive of the coup allegation. "I think it is an orchestration to increase political tension," one diplomat said. "It wouldn't be in anyone's favor to do such a thing now."

■ United States
Database breach at UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles, alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system. Only a small percentage of the records in the database were actually accessed, UCLA spokesman Jim Davis said. The attacks began in October last year and ended on Nov. 21 of this year, when computer security technicians noticed suspicious database queries, according to a statement posted on a school Web site set up to answer questions about the theft.

■ Ethiopia
Court convicts ex-dictator
An Ethiopian court on Tuesday convicted the former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam of genocide, but Mengistu may never face punishment because he remains in exile in Zimbabwe. Mengistu ruled Ethiopia from 1977 to 1991, when government soldiers rounded up tens of thousands of students and intellectuals and killed them in a campaign called the Red Terror. Human Rights Watch has labeled it "one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa." Mengistu, 69, has been widely accused of killing many of the victims with his own hands, including even Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Selassie.

■ Spain
Cops foil lollipop smugglers
Police foiled an attempt to smuggle cocaine into the country inside lollipops, a regional government official said on Tuesday. Gang members in Colombia packed the drug into 55 lollipops and sent them by airmail via Madrid's Barajas Airport, Vicente Ripa Gonzalez, governor of the northern region of Navarra, told a news conference. Civil Guard officers and customs officials intercepted the package at the airport and the post office traced the addressee in the town of Tafalla. Police arrested a 52-year-old woman from the Dominican Republic at the address and later detained a 26-year-old Dominican man and his 34-year-old Colombian girlfriend.

■ Brazil
Web cams foil robbery
Web cams and a cellphone alert helped a Brazilian man traveling in Germany foil a burglary from across the Atlantic Ocean, police said on Tuesday. Businessman Joao Pedro Wettlauser was in Cologne, Germany, on Sunday when he received a cellphone alert informing him someone had entered his vacation house on the Sao Paulo coast. He quickly turned on his laptop and, thanks to security cameras connected to the Internet, was able to see a tattooed man stuffing goods into trash bags, Sao Paulo police said. Wettlauser called his wife, who alerted police. The intruder was arrested.

■ Panama
New foundation fights poverty
Pop diva Shakira and Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Tuesday launched a star-studded foundation to fight child poverty in Latin America. Backed by the Colombians and other luminaries of entertainment and finance, the Latin America in Solidarity Action -- whose Spanish acronym is ALAS, or "wings" -- took flight with a promise to tackle poverty that kills 350,000 children each year in the region. Spanish singer Miguel Bose will serve as executive director of the foundation, conceived about a year ago by Shakira, who also heads the Colombia-based nonprofit foundation Pies Descalzos, or Barefoot, which helps the child victims of violence in that South American country.

■ United Nations
UN looks at organized crime
A commission backed by the world body has been established to investigate rampant organized crime in Guatemala, which authorities say has become a key point of transit for smugglers bringing drugs into the US. The independent commission, comprised of former prosecutors from outside Guatemala, will have an initial two-year mandate to gather evidence and help build cases against illicit criminal groups. Suspects would be tried in local courts. "With this agreement, the United Nations is standing by Guatemala as it tries to solidify democracy and the rule of law by exposing and dismantling criminal groups," UN Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari said in a statement on Tuesday.

■ United States
Second church leader resigns
A second Colorado evangelical leader in little over a month has resigned from the pulpit over a scandal involving gay sex, church officials said on Tuesday. Paul Barnes has resigned from the 2,100-member Grace Chapel, a church he founded in suburban Denver, church spokeswoman Michelle Ames said. Barnes' resignation follows last month's admission by high-profile preacher Ted Haggard that he was guilty of unspecified "sexual immorality" after a male prostitute went public with their liaisons.

■ United States
No bail for Skilling
One day after a federal appellate court ruled that the former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling could remain free until it decided on his request for bail pending appeal of his sentence for conspiracy, fraud and insider trading, the judge in the cased rejected the request. Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in his two-page order on Tuesday that "Skilling raises no substantial question that is likely to result in the reversal of his convictions on all of the charged counts." As a result, Higginbotham denied Skilling's request for bail pending his appeal and vacated an earlier order staying his prison report date.

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