A roundup of today's other stories in brief.
Brothers plead guilty to US drugs charge
MIAMI - Colombian brothers who founded the cartel that once controlled 80 per cent of the world's cocaine pleaded guilty yesterday to conspiring to smuggle more than 200,000kg of cocaine into the United States.
Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela (67) and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela (63) entered the pleas before US district judge Federico Moreno in Miami as part of an agreement that would spare several of their relatives from prosecution.
The brothers founded the Cali cartel in the Colombian city of that name and ran a vast empire that supplied most of the cocaine sold in the US in the early 1990s. - (Reuters)
Archbishop is excommunicated
VATICAN CITY - Former African Catholic archbishop and faith healer Emmanuel Milingo has been excommunicated after defying the Vatican by ordaining four married men as bishops, the Vatican said yesterday. The bishops also incurred excommunication for the act, it said, citing church law.
Mr Milingo, a former archbishop of Lusaka, Zambia, had shocked the Vatican by announcing over the summer that his new mission was to persuade it to allow priests to marry. - (Reuters)
Britain accused in Falklands book
BUENOS AIRES - A new history book describing how Britain illegally "colonised" the Falkland Islands is to be distributed to every secondary school pupil in Argentina.
The book accuses British forces of arriving secretly on the islands in the 18th century and taking it by force from the Spanish. Since then the British have refused offers to discuss the islands' sovereignty with Argentina, the book claims.
The publication comes as a four-day official visit by three members of a British cross-parliamentary committee begins. - (Guardian service)
Muslim cleric shot dead in Russia
MOSCOW - Gunmen have shot dead a Muslim cleric in Russia's southern spa town of Kislovodsk, Interfax news agency reported yesterday. It quoted police as saying the assailants fled after killing the imam of a mosque late on Monday in the doorway of an apartment block where he lived.
Around the same time, Interfax said, a police officer was wounded when trying to stop two armed people in the street. Police do not rule out that the two might have been the killers. - (Reuters)
16 killed as bus overturns
DAR ES SALAAM - A speeding bus overturned killing 16 people outside Tanzania's commercial capital Dar es Salaam, police said yesterday.
The bus, carrying 48 adults and about 10 children aged between one and eight, was on its way to the administrative capital Dodoma on Monday when it rolled. Forty-one people were injured. - (Reuters)