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YANGON: Military-run Myanmar was under renewed pressure Saturday after the United States announced a new round of sanctions following the junta's bloody crackdown on dissent here. US President George W. Bush's new penalties targeted the country's military leaders late Friday and also urged China and India, Myanmar's neighbors and main allies, to step up pressure on the military government. It is the second time in four weeks that the US has increased sanctions on the junta following the regime's clampdown on protests. State media in Yangon has yet to speak about the latest US action, while detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party, the National League for Democracy, also declined to comment on the move.
--AFP
BLITAR, Indonesia: The risk of eruption at an Indonesian volcano on Java island has not passed and remains at high alert status, scientists said Saturday. Volcanologist Agus Budianto said "tremors had calmed down from Mount Kelud since yesterday [Friday] but other indicators still show increasing magmatic pressure from the volcano's belly." Sensors sending real-time information from the mount's peak showed increased temperature at the crater," he said. Tremors rocked Mount Kelut, a 1,731-metre (5,712-foot) peak for nearly an hour on Friday afternoon-usually a precursor of an eruption-said Kristanto, the top volcanologist at the monitoring station.
--AFP
BANGKOK: A Thai court on Saturday granted a police request to extend by at least 12 days the detention of a Canadian schoolteacher accused of sexually abusing boys across Southeast Asia. Christopher Paul Neil, 32, was arrested Friday in Thailand after Interpol launched a rare global hunt for the man seen in 200 Internet photos showing him abusing a dozen young Asian boys.
--AFP
WASHINGTON: Syrups and other anti-flu medicines should not be given to children who are six years old or younger, a independent advisory panel to the US Food and Drug Administration said Friday. "The committee expressed concern about the lack of studies that positively demonstrate the benefit of these products for children and they were uncomfortable with the extrapolation of the benefits that have been demonstrated in adults to use these products in children," Doctor John Jenkins, head of the FDA's division that handles new drugs, told reporters.
--AFP
CHICAGO: Storms that spun tornadoes and dropped pounding hail in the central United States, killing six people, barreled toward the east coast Saturday, bringing hope for relief to parched southern states suffering the worst drought in a century. About 30 tornadoes were reported from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico Thursday (Friday in Manila) as unusually warm temperatures created instability not normally seen this late in the year, the national weather service reported.
--AFP
VANCOUVER, Canada: One person died and two were injured Friday when a light aircraft smashed into a ninth-floor suburban apartment in this western Canadian metropolis, police said. The Piper Seneca, a twin-engine, six-seater aircraft, crashed into the densely populated residential neighborhood of Richmond just after lifting off from Vancouver International Airport Friday afternoon.
--AFP
DUBAI: Iraqi President Jalal Talabani slammed his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad's support for a possible Turkish incursion into northern Iraq to tackle Kurdish rebels, a newspaper said on Saturday. On Wednesday Assad said he would support a Turkish incursion into northern Iraq against Turkish Kurdish rebels, calling such action Ankara's "legitimate right." Syria and Turkey both oppose any Iraqi Kurdish attempt to break away from the central government in Baghdad, fearing that this could fuel separatist ambitions among their own Kurds.
--AFP
MOSUL, Iraq: Kidnappers of two Iraqi Catholic priests abducted last weekend in the northern city of Mosul have demanded a ransom of $1 million for their release, a bishop said on Saturday. The unknown group issued a payment deadline of Saturday morning for the release of fathers Pius Affas and Mazen Ishoa, who are still believed to be alive, the bishop in Mosul told --AFP on condition of anonymity. The 72-hour deadline was given on Thursday, the last time that negotiators, who are using the mobile phone of Father Ishoa, made contact with the kidnappers, he said.
--AFP
ROME: A high-profile Vatican cleric suspended after he was shown on television making advances to a young man allegedly had a list of homosexual priests and bishops in the Roman Catholic Church's governing body, Italy's Panorama weekly reported Friday. Father Tommaso Stenico, 60, had "a detailed dossier" of all the homosexual clerics at Vatican "with a list of names and circumstances implicating a certain number of priests and even bishops working at the Curia," Ignazio Ingrao, reporter for the conservative news weekly said. Stenico also sent his superior Cardinal Claudio Hummes a report denouncing the moral degradation within the Curia, which could make the Vatican "tremble," Ingrao said.
--AFP
VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI stressed the importance of unity among Christians as he met with a delegation from the Mennonite World Conference, a branch of Protestantism. Mennonites are Anabaptist Protestants, signifying their rejection of infant baptism. The world's estimated 1.3 million Mennonites-living in places as diverse as North America, Germany and the Democratic Republic of Congo-also refuse to carry weapons and to enter military service.
--AFP
MOSCOW: Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev founded a new social-democratic movement on Saturday to fight for "free democratic choice" in Russia ahead of parliamentary elections in December. The Union of Social-Democrats said in a statement issued at its founding congress in Moscow that "the potential for free democratic choice and political competition is being limited" in Russia. "The public political space is being restricted. There is greater pressure on civil society. This is why the social-democrats are uniting to fight for the values of freedom and fairness," the statement said. But the union, which is headed up by Gorbachev and is made up of local grassroots organizations, is not a registered political party and will not take part in the elections.
--AFP
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