Today's other stories in brief
Captives freed after Chávez brokers deal
COLOMBIA - Marxist rebels freed four Colombian lawmakers yesterday who had been held hostage for years in the jungle, in a victory for President Hugo Chávez of neighbouring Venezuela who brokered the deal.
Venezuelan helicopters painted with Red Cross logos swooped into the dense jungle to pick up the three men and a woman, all snatched by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, more than six years ago. - ( Reuters)
Radioactive parcels found
LONDON - Firefighters sealed off a building in the Scottish capital Edinburgh yesterday after three packages suspected of containing radioactive materials were discovered, emergency services said.
A box containing packets labelled "strontium", "radium" and "plutonium" was found in a cupboard in a language school in the centre of the city, but officials said there was no cause for alarm and that the materials were probably of low radiation.
"There's no intelligence to suggest anything bad," said Jim Fraser, a spokesman for the local fire brigade.
- (Reuters)
Police aircraft crash kills 10
SANTIAGO - At least 10 people, including four people exercising in a public park, were killed yesterday when a small police aircraft crashed into a sports field in Chile's capital, officials said.
The aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from a nearby airfield. It had experienced technical difficulties and was attempting an emergency landing on the field in Santiago's Penalolen municipality, police said.
The aircraft's six occupants died on impact. Another four people, including a mother and her four-year-old child, died in the playing field as they tried to escape the plane that witnesses said nose-dived into the ground where they were exercising. - (Reuters)
Turkey to end incursion soon
ISTANBUL - Turkey's military operations against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq will last another three or four days, a senior Turkish official said yesterday, after Washington called for a speedy end to the incursion.
Hours after US defence secretary Robert Gates said Turkey must be "mindful of Iraqi sovereignty" and should not extend its operations longer than a week or two, the Turkish official said the cross-border operation would be over by next week. The bulk of the troops would be pulled back, the official added, leaving an uninhabited cordon sanitaire on the south side of the border.
- (Guardian service)
US writer Buckley dies
NEW YORK - Writer and commentator William F Buckley, a revered figure and intellectual force in the American conservative movement for decades, died yesterday aged 82, said the magazine he founded, the National Review.
Buckley carried the title of editor-at-large for the magazine, which he founded in 1955. He was the author of more than 40 books including the recently published Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches and the novel Elvis in the Morning. He was perhaps best known as the host for more than 30 years of the television show Firing Line. - (Reuters)