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World News Quick Take

■ CHINA
Man blows up dinner guests
A villager invited 30 guests to a restaurant dinner and blew them up, killing at least nine people, state press reported on Monday. Another 25 people were injured in the blast on Sunday at the House of Xiaoxiang restaurant in a township in Hunan Province, Xinhua news agency reported. The report, citing police sources, said the villager invited 30 people for dinner with whom he had been in dispute over a family matter. They accepted, believing he wanted to apologize. As they dined, the unidentified man set off the explosives. It was unclear if he had survived, nor how many of the other dead and injured had been there at his invitation. Police are searching for a man from Wenjiashi Township in Hunan's Liuyang City.

■ INDIA
Pakistan talks planned
New Delhi and Islamabad will hold new peace talks next month to boost efforts to cooperate against terrorism and reduce the risk of a nuclear war beginning by accident, the foreign ministry said. The two sides, which launched a slow-moving peace process in January 2004, will discuss ways of implementing "conventional confidence-building measures" in New Delhi on Oct. 18, the ministry said in a statement late on Monday. Top officials will also discuss issues relating to nuclear safeguards, or ways of keeping their respective nuclear arsenals under control, a day later.

■ JAPAN
Violent teacher honored
A teacher who threw a chair at his students was named "super teacher" by the local board of education despite having been reprimanded several times for using corporal punishment, a news agency said on Saturday. The 52-year-old high school teacher in Kyoto has been awarded the title every year since 2005 in spite of a history of aggression in the classroom because his strict teaching methods improved his students' performance. He was punished three times between 1997 and 2001 for physically attacking students, including throwing a chair at the volleyball team he was coaching, and was again accused of corporal punishment this year, Kyodo news agency said.

■ Nepal
Maoists quit government
Former Maoist rebels said yesterday they had quit the interim government after they failed to reach a deal with the prime minister to abolish the Himalayan monarchy. The move is a major setback to last year's peace deal in which the former rebels ended a decade-old insurgency and agreed to hold elections for a special assembly to decide the fate of the monarchy.

■ CANADA
Holocaust reference offends
A phone company has apologized after a punk-rock reference to the Holocaust appeared on billboard advertisements for its cellphones. The ads for Bell Canada's Solo discount service showed a young woman decked out in flashy punk rock attire, with a button that reads Belsen was a Gas -- the controversial title of a song by the Sex Pistols, and a reference to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. "It was inadvertent," a Bell Canada spokesman said on Friday, noting that the dozen ads were taken down as soon as the company realized its mistake.

■ UNITED KINGDOM
Foot-and-mouth strikes
Sheep on a farm in southern England were being slaughtered on Monday as authorities tested for a suspected new case of foot-and-mouth disease, officials said. Britain's environment department said initial blood tests suggested the animals had been infected with the disease, which has struck cattle and sheep on farms close to a medical research laboratory. The latest suspected case is inside a 3km protection zone set up close to the latest reported cases in Surrey, south of London, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said.

■ DENMARKk
Golden horns go missing
The prized replacement copies of two golden horns that were stolen and melted down in an audacious crime more than 200 years ago have also been snatched, officials said on Monday. Burglars struck on Monday at a museum in Jelling and stole the golden replicas of two original horns that were believed to date back to the year 400. The originals, found in 1639 and 1734, were stolen by an indebted goldsmith in 1802. He melted them into fake coins and jewelry before he was caught.

■ LITHUANIA
Baboon adopts chicken
A lonely baboon in a private zoo has adopted a chicken he saved from certain death last month and the two have formed a fast friendship, the zoo's director said on Friday. The chicken was intended as food for other animals in the zoo, but escaped and was sheltered by Mitis, a six-year-old Hamadryas Baboon, said Edvardas Legeckas, who runs the zoo near the port city Klaipeda in western Lithuania. Mitis has been fed chicken meat before, but this time he fell in love with his food, Legeckas said. "He plays with the chicken, cleans its feathers, sleeps with it, and takes care as if it was his own baby child," the zoo director said. "But I am not sure how long this affair would last, because [the] baboon may finally realize this is food."

■ FRANCE
Former-Burundi PM jailed
Former Burundian prime minister Gabriel Mpozagara and his wife were sentenced on Monday to between a year and 15 months in jail for keeping two of their nieces in slave-like conditions. Mpozagara and his wife were each fined 10,000 euros (US$13,869) and ordered to pay 24,000 euros in damages and interest to the elder of the two nieces, their lawyer said. He said the two young girls were kept in conditions resembling child slavery between 1994 and 1999 at the couples' plush home in the town of Ville d'Avray. "They were kept in a cellar and lacked a proper toilet and were given just a little water to wash themselves," he said. The elder niece "was the maid and had to work seven days a week, for between 16 and 17 hours daily, to attend to the tasks of the couple and their six children," said anti-slavery body CCEM.

■ UNITED STATE
'Mr Skin' publishes book
Jim McBride has made it his life's work to know how much naked female flesh appears in movies. So far McBride, also known as Mr Skin, and a staff that includes his mother, who works as a "skintern," have chronicled nude women in more than 25,000 movies and TV shows. It is all recorded on his Web site, www.mrskin.com, which has been running for eight years, and on Saturday McBride launched into print, publishing Mr Skin's Skintastic Video Guide to "the 501 greatest movies for sex and nudity on DVD." "It's the greatest job in the world," McBride said.

■ IRAQ
Bomb, mortar kill seven
Seven people were killed when rebels blew up a car bomb and fired a mortar yesterday in the car park of Baghdad's main morgue as it was crowded with people searching for relatives, officials said. The bomb exploded at around 9:30am, followed minutes later by the mortar attack, security officials said. The morgue, behind the ministry of health building in central Baghdad's Babel Muaddam neighborhood, was at the time filled with people hunting for missing relatives -- victims of relentless sectarian violence in the capital.

■ VENEZUELA
`Dead' man wakes up
A man who had been declared dead woke up in the morgue in excruciating pain after medical examiners began their autopsy. Carlos Camejo, 33, was declared dead after a highway accident and taken to the morgue, where examiners began an autopsy only to realize something was amiss when he started bleeding. They quickly sought to stitch up the incision on his face. "I woke up because the pain was unbearable," Camejo said, according to a report on Friday in leading local newspaper El Universal. His grieving wife turned up at the morgue to identify her husband's body only to find him moved into a corridor -- and alive.

■ UNITED STATES
Flamingo in a tight spot
Animal expert Jack Hanna and an 11-month-old flamingo became trapped while trying to squeeze through a security turnstile at an Ohio airport. Hanna, the director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and a frequent guest on talk shows, was returning from a fundraiser with a mongoose, a small leopard and the flamingo. Three other people were with them. The entourage arrived at the Ohio State University Airport late on Sunday. The only way to leave the tarmac was through a 3m-tall metal turnstile. Hanna got stuck in the turnstile with the flamingo's compartment, but he eventually squirmed free. It took three firefighters to hoist the flamingo's crate out of the turnstile, he said.

■ PERU
Sickness follows meteorite
Villagers in the south were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said on Monday. Around midday on Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball in the high Andes near the border with Bolivia. Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP. Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said. Experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 30m-wide and 6m-deep crater, local official Marco Limache said.

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