Italian PM arrives in Beijing:
Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi arrived in Beijing yesterday for a two-day visit, the official Xinhua news agency reported. AFP says from Beijing.
Prodi, who is in China at the invitation of his Chinese counterpart Li Peng, is heading a large business delegation that also includes trade minister Augusto Fantozzi. It is his first trip to China as Prime Minister.
WWII bomb detonated in France: Explosives experts on Wednesday detonated a British World War Il bomb found on a worksite near the prestigious new National French Library, police said. AFP reports from Paris.
Bomb dlsplosal experts dug a crater 10 metres (30 feet) deep to explode the device after all attempts to disarm it failed. About 1,500 people living near the site were evacuated as a precaution before the successful controlled blast. The bomb was inadvertently brought to the site in a lorry-load of gravel.
Chinese dissident Bao Ge freed:
Shanghai dissident Bao Ge has been released after completing a three-year term in a labour camp, sources close to the family said yesterday, AFP reports from Shanghai.
"Bao Ge was released from the dafeng labour camp in Jiangsu Kovince at 8.30 Wednesday evening." said a young woman who entitled herself only as a friend of the family, lie got home late last night, but his telephone line has been cut so he can't make direct contact." she added.
Aime Michaels wins ’Orange Award’:
Canadian writer Anne Michaels won the Orange Award for women's fiction Wednesday with her first novel "Fugitive Pieces," AP reports from-London.
Michaels, an award-winning poet who teaches creative writing at Toronto University, took 10 years to write the book, about a Jewish boy, Jakob Beer, and ills escape from Poland to Canada in World War II.
The characters came to me very vividly and wouldn’t go away," Michaels. 39. said at the awards ceremony at the National Liberal Club, central London. The award, worth 30.000 pounds (dlrs 48.000) to the winner, is open for women of any nationality writing in English.
Dutch woman killed in Vietnam:
A Dutch woman visiting southern Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City was stabbed to death during a botched robbeiy inside a crowded market, a Dutch diplomat said Thursday. AP reports from Ho Chi Minh City.
It was one of the first times a foreigner was killed during a crime in post-war Vietnam, which boasts an impressively low crime rate in Asia. The 26-year-old woman, whose name has not been released pending notification of her relatives, was stabbed once in the back and once in the chest Wednesday morning, said Chris Van Vliet, a diplomat for the Netherlands based in Ho Chi Minh City.
UAE donates medicines to Iraq: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has donated 325 tonnes of medicines to sanctions-hit Iraq, a representative of the UAE's Red Crescent said Wednesday. AFP reports from Baghdad.
Said Mohamed al-Mansouri told reporters that the medicines, worth 1.1 million dollars, arrived in Iraq on Tuesday on board eight refrigerated trucks and that distribution be-S;an to four Baghdad hospitals on Wednesday. The UAE has sent raq three loads of food and medicine so far this year.
36 workers feared dead in Thailand: Thirty-six Thai women factory workers were feared dead after a bus taking them to a night shift plunged into an irrigation canal in northern Lopburi province early this morning, police said, Reuter reports from Bangkok.
The chartered bus was carrying 51 people, Including the driver, when the accident occurred shortly after midnight at Baan Mee district about 180 km (85 miles) north of Bangkok. A police official told Reuters that 25 bodies had been recovered from the canal and ri, more were still missing. The bus driver andJ4 other^ escaped Withinjuries, he said.