A round up of today's other stories in brief...
US court rules $2.5bn oil spill award slashed
WASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court yesterday threw out the record $2.5 billion in punitive damages that Exxon Mobil had been ordered to pay for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska, the nation's worst tanker spill.
By a 5-3 vote, the high court ruled that the punitive damages award should be slashed - limited by the circumstances of the case to an amount equal to the total relevant compensatory damages of $507.5 million.
The justices overturned a ruling by a US Court of Appeals that had awarded the record punitive damages to about 32,000 commercial fishermen, Alaska natives, property owners and others harmed by the spill. - ( Reuters)
Briton guilty of family murders
Massachusetts - Briton Neil Entwistle was found guilty of the murders of his American wife and baby daughter yesterday.
Entwistle (29) was convicted of shooting his wife, Rachel (27), and their daughter, Lillian Rose (nine months), at their home in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, in 2006.
The former computer worker, from Kilton, Worksop, was found guilty of first degree murder after about 13 hours of jury deliberations at Middlesex County Superior Court. -( PA)
Conrad Black ruling upheld
CHICAGO - A federal appeals court yesterday upheld the conviction of former press baron Conrad Black and three ex-colleagues found guilty last year of defrauding shareholders of one-time newspaper publishing giant Hollinger International.
The unanimous 16-page decision from a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected all of the points lawyers for Black and the others made. -( Reuters)
French hostages freed - Red Cross
NIAMEY - The Red Cross said yesterday it had received four French hostages freed by Niger Justice Movement rebels in northern Niger, confirming an announcement posted by the rebel group on its website.
"We can confirm that the four French citizens and a Nigerian citizen as well have been handed over to the ICRC," Juan Coderque, of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) regional office in Senegal said. - ( Reuters)
UN hails Syria's help over reactor
VIENNA - A UN nuclear watchdog probe into a suspected secret nuclear reactor in Syria is off to "a good start" and inspectors were generally satisfied with Damascus's co-operation, their leader said yesterday.
Olli Heinonen, speaking to reporters on his return to Vienna after four days in Syria, said his team was able to take test samples "of quite a lot of things" at the remote desert site where Washington said Damascus had a nascent reactor before it was destroyed in an Israeli air strike last September. -( Reuters)
Worker kills five after factory row
CHICAGO - A worker at a plastics plant in Kentucky shot and killed five people inside the factory yesterday and wounded a sixth before killing himself, police said.
Local media reports said the violence was triggered by a dispute the 25-year-old man had with a supervisor, who was among the dead.
The police department in Henderson, Kentucky, said the man who carried out the shooting entered the Atlantis Plastics plant in Henderson and began firing a handgun. He was not immediately identified. - ( Reuters)