A round-up of today's other stories in brief
26 die in car bomb outside Baghdad
BAGHDAD - A car bomb killed at least 26 people outside a Shia mosque north of Baghdad yesterday as Iraqi leaders failed to make progress towards forming a national unity government.
The explosion in the town of Howaydir was the latest attack against Iraq's Shia majority that Washington fears will push the country close to full-scale communal conflict. - (Reuters)
Chernobyl effect hangs over sheep
LONDON - Hundreds of British sheep farms still blighted by the effects of radioactive fall-out after the world's worst nuclear accident two decades ago at Chernobyl, will have to follow strict safety measures for years to come, it emerged yesterday.
Checks on sheep over the past two years for the UK Food Standards Agency suggest levels of caesium, the main radioactive element, are still high in uplands affected by rain carrying contaminated material released by the blast. - (Guardian service)
16 die in ambush, blast and riots
COLOMBO - Blasts blamed on Tamil Tiger rebels and riots that followed killed 16 people yesterday and injured dozens in northeast Sri Lanka, officials said, raising fears that peace talks might not happen and war might restart.
Two policemen died in a claymore mine ambush, while one soldier and four civilians were killed in a blast in a crowded market place. Nine others died in riots that followed. - (Reuters)
Aids group to return to forum
JOHANNESBURG - South Africa's health ministry has reversed a decision to bar the country's top Aids activist group from a major United Nations forum on the epidemic.
The health ministry issued a list of groups invited to take part in the UN General Assembly Special Session on Aids which included a representative from the previously excluded Treatment Action Campaign. - (Reuters)
Medicine for man on death row
TEXAS - A judge in Fort Worth, Texas, who halted an execution because the inmate was mentally ill, has agreed to force the man to take anti-psychotic medication so he can be put to death. Steven Kenneth Staley (43), has refused to take his medication. - (AP)
Muslims rip up copies of 'Playboy'
JAKARTA - About 300 hardline Indonesian Muslims vandalised a building housing the office of Playboy magazine in a protest against its publication in the world's most populous Muslim nation. Shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest), the protesters also ripped apart copies of the Indonesian Playboy which, unlike the US original, does not show nudity. - (Reuters)
Pointer Sister dies of cancer
LOS ANGELES - June Pointer, youngest of the Pointer Sisters pop group, whose hits included Fire, Slow Hand and I'm So Excited, died of cancer aged 52 yesterday, a family spokesman said. - (Reuters)
Action over ad ban threatened
BERLIN/PARIS - EU health commissioner Markos Kyprianou has threatened legal action against Germany and several other EU states for their "stubborn" refusal to implement an EU ban on tobacco advertising. - (Guardian service)