A round-up of today's other stories in brief
Car bomb in Karachi kills three
A car bomb exploded outside a KFC fast-food restaurant in the Pakistani city of Karachi yesterday, killing three people and wounding 15 in an attack thought to have been carried out by Islamist militants.
Some victims suffered severe burns in the bombing, which blew a metre-wide (3-feet-wide) hole in the street and engulfed it in a fireball that destroyed six or seven other parked cars in the centre of the city. - (Reuters)
Canada moves closer to election
OTTAWA - Canada's political parties lurched closer to a January election yesterday, with prime minister Paul Martin's minority Liberal government all but certain to fall this month.
The recent and rare unified stance of the country's usually fractious opposition parties on bringing down the government is holding, and a no confidence motion in the government is expected to be debated in Parliament next week. - (Reuters)
Libya execution decision delayed
TRIPOLI - Libya's Supreme Court yesterday postponed to January 31st its ruling in the final appeal of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death for deliberately infecting children with the HIV virus.
"The court delays the hearing to January 31st to give further time for the defence," presiding judge Ali al-Alouss said.
Mohamed al-Maghribi, lawyer for the infected victims, said the court was responding to a request from the government for more time to organise its case and to provide new evidence. - (Reuters)
Freedom for Fujimori rejected
SANTIAGO - A Chilean court rejected yesterday a motion to free Peruvian ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who has been in jail in Santiago for a week pending an extradition request from Peru. - (Reuters)
Woman in jail after elopement
ATLANTA - A pregnant 37-year-old woman who eloped with a 15-year-old boy was in jail on charges of child molestation in the southern US state of Georgia yesterday.
Lisa Lynnette Clark was arrested last week in Hall County, Georgia, a day after a judge married her and the unidentified teenager. - (Reuters)
Move to ban drink in Algeria fails
ALGIERS - Islamist parties yesterday failed to push through the Algerian parliament a proposal to ban alcohol throughout the country.
Islamist members of parliament tried to take advantage of a vote on a draft 2006 budget to propose amendments to end alcohol imports, ban all sales, and to shut breweries and transform them into soft drinks and mineral water plants. - (Reuters)
Holocaust denier is deported
STUTTGART - A man who published a study that he said proved the Nazis did not gas Jews at Auschwitz was deported from the US to his native Germany yesterday to serve a prison term for Holocaust denial.
Germar Rudolf, also known as Germar Scheerer, had his emergency petition to block the deportation rejected by the US Supreme Court last week. on Thursday. - (Reuters)
Westlife turn on the London lights
LONDON - Irish boy band Westlife got the festive shopping season under way in central London yesterday when they turned on the Christmas lights in Oxford Street. - (Reuters)
The group switched on the dazzling display featuring 260,000 bulbs and performed two of their hits.