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World News Quick Take

■ China
Shanxi chief apologizes
The governor of coal-rich Shanxi Province has made a rare public apology for a rash of coal mine disasters last year, the Xinhua news agency reported yesterday. "As the leader of the provincial government, I shall take the responsibility for the failure and I feel deep remorse," Yu was quoted as saying. "We must take more effective measures this year and achieve positive results." In a report to the provincial congress, Yu said an average 80 people died for every 100 million tonnes of coal produced last year in Shanxi, down from 98 people in 2005, Xinhua reported.

■ China
Meat sellers poisoning dogs
Thieves poisoned more than 100 pet dogs in Guangdong Province's Taian village over the past few months and sold them to restaurants, village council chairman Yu Tiansong said yesterday. The thieves fed dogs poisoned noodles and later collected their bodies, Yu said by telephone. "The thieves come around midnight on bicycles," he said. "They roam around the village and feed the dogs with poisonous rice noodles." He said that the dogs died within 10 minutes after eating the tainted food: "They only steal the bigger dogs, so in the next morning we can see the smaller dead dogs scattered on the streets."

■ Canada
Beijing wants fugitive
Beijing wants Canada to extradite a fugitive banker accused of embezzling millions of dollars, the Globe and Mail reported on Monday. The newspaper said Gao Shan (高山), 42, a former head of the Bank of China in Harbin, is wanted for allegedly siphoning off US$125 million from customers and transferring the funds to a Canadian account.

■ Afghanistan
Bomber attacks convoy
A suicide car bomber attacked an Afghan army convoy in western Afghanistan yesterday, wounding three soldiers and two civilians, officials said. The bomber blew himself up next to a bus carrying the soldiers near the airport in the western city of Herat, said General Fazludin Sayar, deputy corps commander in western Afghanistan.

■ Australia
Earthquake hits Macquarie
A magnitude 6.7 earthquake rocked the coast of Australia's remote Macquarie Island yesterday, the US Geological Survey said. The quake struck west of Macquarie Island at 2:54pm local time, and was centered 10km below the seabed. Stuart Koyanagi, a geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at Ewa Beach, Hawaii, said the quake was unlikely to generate a major Pacific-wide tsunami. Clive Collins, a seismologist at Geoscience Australia, said the Macquarie Island earthquake involved two tectonic plates moving against each other horizontally, rather than vertically, and was unlikely to displace the quantity of water needed to generate a tsunami.

■ Australia
Gitmo inmate may be ill
Australia's sole remaining inmate at Guantanamo Bay is showing signs of increasingly poor mental health, his lawyer said yesterday after a rare meeting with the prisoner at the US military camp. David Hicks, a former kangaroo skinner from southern Australia, has been held at the US military facility in Cuba since early 2002. He is awaiting charges under the revised military tribunal system approved by the US Congress late last year. McLeod said Hicks is locked up for 22 hours a day and has only been outside three times since last month.

■ United Kingdom
Two charged with terrorism
Two men arrested last week after police raids in northern England were charged on Monday under the Terrorism Act, police said. A statement from London's Metropolitan Police said the men, 29-year-old Rizwan Ditta and 25-year-old Mohammad Dilal, possessed computer files and compact discs containing information useful to a person committing or planning an act of terrorism. Police said the material found included computer files entitled "Attack Against American Troops," "Hamas Bomb" and "Instructions." One of the CDs had a clip entitled "al-Qaeda," police said in a statement.

■ Russia
Nuclear plant shut down
An unspecified safety problem prompted an emergency shutdown at a nuclear power plant, federal officials said yesterday. Radiation levels in and around the plant were normal following the incident at the first unit of the Balakovsky plant, which occurred at 11:15pm on Monday, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. The plant is located near the Volga River city of Saratov, about 700km southeast of Moscow. "Initial reports indicate the cause of the shutdown was a problem with the safety system. The reactor has been taken offline," a ministry statement said.

■ Sweden
Nuclear probe launched
The nuclear authority on Monday asked prosecutors to investigate whether the operator of a nuclear power plant broke the law in its response to a malfunction last year. Two reactors at the Forsmark plant, 100km north of Stockholm, were shut down in July after two backup generators malfunctioned during a power failure. They went back on the grid two months later after security upgrades. In its complaint to prosecutors, the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate said plant managers acted too slowly in cooling down one of the reactors after the incident. Such a decision was not made until one day after the July 25 incident, the inspectorate said.

■ Nigeria
Authorities test for H5N1
Health authorities are testing samples taken from 14 people to determine whether they've been infected with bird flu, officials said on Monday. Among the 14 people, three samples were from women who died with symptoms consistent with H5N1 infection. Abdullahi Nasidi, director of public health at the Health Ministry, said the samples were taken from people living in Lagos, the country's biggest city, with 14 million people. He had no further details. Preliminary tests conducted recently on the samples came back negative, the WHO said. Specimens have also been sent to a British laboratory.

■ Guinea-Bissau
Gomes leaves UN protection
The former prime minister has left UN protection, more than two weeks after he accused the West African country's president of murder and sought asylum at a UN office. UN officials said an arrest warrant against Carlos Gomes Jr. had been dropped and the government had assured his safety. Gomes left the building on Monday accompanied by his daughter and proceeded to his home in the capital. He refused to speak to the press. Gomes had been in the building since Jan. 10, when he fled an arrest warrant issued after he alleged that President Joao Bernardo Vieira was behind the recent assassination of an ex-military commander.

■ United States
Boy arrested over video
A fourth teenager was arrested on Monday in the beating of a girl that was recorded on video camera and broadcast on the Internet, police said. The 16-year-old North Babylon, New York, boy, who recorded the Dec. 18 beating of a 13-year-old girl by three other girls, surrendered to police on Monday afternoon, Suffolk County police said. Earlier this month police arrested two 14-year-old girls and a 13-year-old girl on charges of juvenile delinquency and attempted assault. The video was shown on Web sites including YouTube and MySpace.

■ United States
Sub commander sacked
The US Navy on Monday relieved a submarine commander of his duties three weeks after his vessel collided with a Japanese oil tanker in the Persian Gulf. Commander Matthew Weingart was removed because of "a lack of confidence in his ability to command," the Navy said in a statement on Monday. The USS Newport News, a nuclear-powered submarine, rear-ended the supertanker Mogamigawa on Jan. 8 in the 54.7km wide Straits of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world's oil supplies travel. The submarine will undergo repairs in Bahrain.

■ United States
Hells Angels club searched
Heavily armed police searched the New York City headquarters of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club in response to a report that a woman may have been beaten there. The unidentified woman was found unconscious outside the club late on Sunday night, police said. The woman was hospitalized in serious condition. After witnesses reported seeing her thrown out of the club, police, aided by heavily armed Emergency Service Unit officers returned on Monday with a search warrant. A lawyer for the Hells Angels later told WCBS-TV that police had detained a Hells Angels member and were planning to charge him with assault.

■ United States
Paper podcasts complaints
The San Francisco Chronicle is turning complaint calls into podcasts on its Web site. Dubbed "Correct Me If I'm Wrong ... " on the Web site, the paper last week posted a podcast of a reader's voicemail expressing irritation with an Aug. 29 photo caption and headline "Forest service begins testing pilotless drones." "Is there any other kind of drone?" the reader said in the voice mail. "You tell me right now, is there any other kind of drone other than a pilotless drone?" Callers' names are not edited out of the voicemails, and it was unclear whether they had been notified that their messages would be posted.

■ United States
Student prank goes awry
A high school lunch period in Westerville, Ohio, was disrupted by a greased, naked student prankster who ran around screaming and flailing his arms until police twice used a stun gun on him, authorities said. Taylor Killian, 18, had rubbed his body with oil to keep from being caught, and got up after the first time he was shocked to continue running toward frightened students at Westerville North High School, authorities said on Monday. A police officer was monitoring the lunch period at the time. The officer did not recognize Killian as a student. School officials reported that Killian was a good student. There was no indication of substance abuse or a medical problem.

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