Today's other stories in brief
Bush threatens Iran with more sanctions
ROME - US President George W Bush yesterday threatened Iran with more sanctions if it failed to stop enriching uranium and said all options were on the table to thwart Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Mr Bush, who met German Chancellor Angela Merkel as part of his week-long tour of Europe before flying to Rome, is pressing allies to agree new punitive measures against Iran. Meanwhile President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said western threats and pressure had failed to stop Iran's nuclear programme. "With God's help today have gained victory and the enemies cannot do a damned thing," Mr Ahmadinejad said. - (Reuters)
Secret al-Qaeda files found on train
LONDON - British police have launched an investigation into the loss of documents, which BBC television said included top-secret government reports on Iraq and al-Qaeda, found on the seat of a London train. "We can confirm we are making inquiries in connection with a loss of documents," a police spokeswoman said.
BBC television said its correspondent had seen the documents, an orange file containing at least seven pages of top-secret information on Iraq and al-Qaeda. The file was found by a train passenger. The apparent security breach could embarrass the government of Gordon Brown, already reeling after a civil servant lost computer disks containing the addresses and bank details of millions of people in the mail last year. - (Reuters)
Timor protests at car extravagance
DILI - About a thousand students rallied outside East Timor's parliament yesterday to protest against a decision to buy 65 Toyota Land Cruisers - one for each member of parliament - in one of the world's poorest nations. The protest comes amid surging food and fuel prices in a country where the average income is just 50 US cents a day and where 42 per cent of the population is unemployed. - (Reuters)
30 killed in air crash in Khartoum
KHARTOUM - A Sudanese airliner coming from Amman and Damascus burst into flames after landing in Khartoum late on Tuesday night, killing at least 30 of the 214 people on board, officials and witnesses said yesterday.
At least 178 passengers and crew escaped the burning Sudan Airways plane and survived, while six others were still missing, the airline's general manager Abdullah Idris told journalists. Mr Idris appealed for the six missing passengers to get in touch, saying he hoped they had left the airport in the confusion after the blaze and had gone straight home without informing authorities. - (Reuters)
Five drown in Mexican floods
MEXICO CITY - Floods in central and southern Mexico killed five people including a four-year-old girl and a US tourist, rescue workers said yesterday. About 7,000 people were evacuated in the southern state of Oaxaca, where the US tourist drowned in fierce waves off a Pacific coast beach, a state civil protection official said. The heavy rains at the start of the rainy season also soaked the oil-producing state of Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico. - (Reuters)
Kosovo adopts national anthem
PRISTINA - Kosovo adopted a national anthem yesterday, days before its constitution comes into effect, but chose music without lyrics to avoid offending the state's Serb minority. The new anthem by ethnic- Albanian composer Mendi Mengjiqi was approved by parliament after he won a competition that forbade references to the cultures of any of Kosovo's ethnic groups. - (Reuters)