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World News Quick Take

■Former PM leaves clinic

Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad left a top heart clinic yesterday after being hospitalized for nearly seven weeks following bypass surgery. Mahathir, 82, waved to media photographers as he walked with his family out of Kuala Lumpur's National Heart Institute, where he had spent much of his time in an intensive care ward since the Sept. 4 surgery. Mahathir chose to have the bypass after suffering two heart attacks since November.



■ AUSTRALIA

Child killer suspect charged

A woman appeared in court yesterday charged with murdering a two-year-old boy whose body was found in a suitcase dumped in a pond in Sydney. The 26-year-old Sydney woman, whose name cannot be released for legal reasons, was refused bail. The woman, whom media reports said was believed to be the victim's mother, was arrested late on Saturday. A group of children found the naked body last Wednesday stuffed into a suitcase and floating in a duck pond at a suburban Sydney park.



■ SRI LANKA

One soldier, 16 rebels killed

A Tamil Tiger rebel artillery attack killed a government soldier and wounded three others on the front lines in the north, an official said yesterday, a day after army artillery killed 16 rebels in the same area. The guerrillas attacked soldiers guarding a defense line on Saturday in Vavuniya District's Thampane village, just south of the rebels' de facto state, a defense ministry official said on condition of anonymity. Retaliatory fire wounded 20 insurgents, the official said. He said two separate artillery duels in the same region killed 16 rebels Saturday. The military's claims could not be independently verified.



■ SOUTH KOREA

N Korea cries foul at sea

North Korea yesterday accused Seoul's warships of recent intrusions into its territorial waters, saying the actions were an attempt to undermine a recent accord. The North's Navy Command claimed 54 South Korean warships intruded deep into the North's waters near the disputed western sea border last week, despite its repeated radio-broadcast warnings to sail back to the South. "The behavior is an unpardonable and undisguised provocation" to a joint declaration signed by the leaders of the two Koreas earlier this month, the command said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. A defense ministry official in Seoul disputed the claim, saying its navy vessels didn't violate the border.



■ JAPAN

Postcard comes 64 years late

A postcard mailed by a Japanese soldier from a World War II battlefield in Burma reached his friend 64 years after it was sent, thanks to a Japanese exchange student and the family of a former US soldier who kept the card. The card was handed to Shizuo Nagano, 80, in southern Kochi Prefecture by a student from Mukogawa Women's University. The postcard was written by Nobuchika Yamashita, who used to work with Nagano at their neighborhood store before being drafted. The student received the card from a woman in Hawaii whose dead father-in-law had brought the card to the US after a tour of duty in Nagasaki in World War II. The postcard, dated Feb. 16, 1943, begins: "Mr. Nagano, it's been a long time." Yamashita died of an illness in November 1944 at age 23 in Burma.

■Rebels fight nationalists

Clashes broke out between rebels and a pro-government militia in the eastern part of the country, forcing people to flee their homes, a UN official said. The fighting on Saturday in two villages in North Kivu Province pitted rebels loyal to former army General Laurent Nkunda against Mai Mai militiamen, said Major Prem Kumar Tiwari, a spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force in Congo. Tiwari did not know how many people had fled the fighting, which took place about 95km north of the regional capital, Goma.



■ GAZA STRIP

Israeli plane fires on boat

Military aircraft on Saturday fired a missile at a fishing boat carrying two Palestinians, including an Islamic Jihad militant, the military said. It was not immediately clear whether both were killed in the strike offshore. Body parts washed ashore, but identification was difficult, medics said. The two men were identified as Nizar Abu Arab, 22, an Islamic Jihad member, and Raed Shamalakh, 22. Both worked as life guards for the Gaza City municipality. Their clothes and ID cards were found on the beach. The army said Abu Arab was the target of the missile strike. Several hours after the missile hit, rescue workers were still looking for remains.



■ GAZA STRIP

`Hamas takeover a mistake'

Hamas' violent takeover of the territory in June was a "serious strategic mistake," a former Hamas government spokesman wrote in a scathing letter posted on a Web site affiliated with Hamas' political rival, Fatah. It is unusual for Hamas members to go public with internal disagreements, and it was not immediately clear whether the five-page letter by the former spokesman, Ghazi Hamad, was intended for publication. Hamad could not be reached for comment yesterday. He stepped down from his post after Hamas defeated Fatah-allied security forces in the territory in a week of fighting this summer.



■ ISRAEL

Surfing champion detained

Police detained eight-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater early on Saturday after a scuffle with photographers who were trying to take pictures of him with supermodel Bar Rafaeli, police said. Photographers were waiting outside as Rafaeli and the American surfer left a hotel in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya before dawn Saturday, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. In an effort to prevent the cameramen from taking pictures, Slater pushed them, a photographer at the scene told Channel Two TV. "A brawl broke out and Slater was taken for questioning and later released," Rosenfeld said.



■ SUDAN

Violence erupts in camp

A number of people have died and others have been injured during recent violence at a camp in southern Darfur, an African Union (AU) spokesman said on Saturday. Al Sahafa, the independent daily newspaper reporting from Darfur, said at least five people were killed and nine others were injured inside the Kalama camp. Al Sahafa said the clashes were sparked by differences among tribal groups that signed a peace agreement with the government last year and those who did not sign the agreement. The violence comes a week before Darfur rebel factions and the government are set to meet in Libya to try to put an end to violence in the region.

■Immigrant drop raided
Police in Arizona raiding a drop house for illegal immigrants discovered several, including a pregnant woman, who had been beaten and tortured by their handlers, authorities said. One man's head had been wrapped in a plastic bag and submerged in a waste-filled toilet, said Maricopa County sheriff spokesman Captain Paul Chagolla. The man's pregnant wife was severely beaten and probably will lose her baby, he said. Deputies were investigating reports that smugglers held at least five other immigrants at gunpoint and demanded more money. Police took 54 people into custody after the raid on Friday, including four children and seven suspected smugglers.

■ UNITED STATES
Ladybugs fight pests
Ladybugs -- 720,000 of them -- have been released in the middle of New York City to help protect one of the city's biggest apartment complexes from pests. They will crawl into plants, flowers and shrubs in the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex in search of insects, leaf-sucking aphids and mites. Buying the bugs -- at US$16.50 for 2,000 -- means the complex can avoid using chemical insecticides. "In most cases, we reach for a can of pesticide and we kill not only the `bad guys,' but the `good guys,'" said Eric Vinje, owner of Planet Natural, which supplied the pest-killers.

■ UNITED STATES
Woman rescued at sea
A 49-year-old woman stayed afloat for 19 hours in the Pacific Ocean, clutching a water container, until she was rescued, she said. Lillian Ruth Simpson said her canoe flipped in strong winds about 1.6km off the Hawaiian coast. She could not right the canoe and tried to swim to shore and failed. "The times I thought, `I'm going to die, I'm going to die,' I would say, `No, I have three kids and you're not taking me anywhere,'' she said. She spent a long night dozing off, accidentally swallowing sea water, throwing up and trying to keep warm by wrapping her bathing suit top around her head.

■ COLOMBIA
Man sews mouth shut
An unemployed man has sewn shut his mouth and locked himself behind an iron mask to demand the government attend to his family's desperate economic plight. Luis Miguel Aldana, 52, said on Saturday that he started the peculiar protest five days ago, after being locked out of his apartment in Bogota. Instead of paying two months of rent, Aldana says he bought shoes for his three children. Now he is demanding the government provide a loan to jump-start a cottage textile business and pay health care bills for his wife and children. Without the loan, he says his family will end up living on the streets.

■ CANADA
Facts on crash emerge
Government investigators on Saturday sifted through the wreckage of a small plane that crashed into an apartment building in a Vancouver suburb, killing the pilot and injuring two residents. Witnesses said the twin-engine Piper Seneca appeared to be flying erratically soon after taking off on Friday afternoon from Vancouver International Airport. It was not known if the 82-year-old pilot, the plane's lone occupant, had any communication with air traffic controllers. The plane hit with such force that it traveled through a ninth-floor apartment and hit the elevator shaft, a transportation official said.

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