World Briefs

HIROSHIMA Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized countries, meeting yesterday in the atomic-bombed Japanese city of Hiroshima, called for a renewed push for flagging nuclear disarmament efforts as they wrestled with some of the intractable global problems facing their nations.

KOREAS A colonel from North Korea’s military spy agency fled to South Korea last year in an unusual case of a senior-level defection. The announcement came three days after Seoul revealed that 13 North Koreans working at the same restaurant in a foreign country had defected to the South.

THAILAND may be going through its driest period in 20 years. But the country’s military government wants visitors from around the globe to know that the biggest water fight in the world is still on.

PHILIPPINES The military says eight more Abu Sayyaf extremists have died and a top militant commander has been wounded as troops pressed a major offensive following the killings of 18 soldiers in fierce fighting over the weekend.

BANGLADESH is closing its notorious 18th-century prison where sensational political killings over decades have targeted people on both sides of the South Asian country’s 1971 war for independence from Pakistan.

INDIA Medical teams yesterday tended to hundreds of people injured in a massive fire that killed at least 110 people, while authorities searched for those responsible for illegally putting on the fireworks display that caused the weekend blaze at a Hindu temple in southern India. Police detained five workers for questioning about fireworks stored at the site, hoping to learn more about who owned the fireworks and who had contracted the pyrotechnical display.

PORTUGAL’s Supreme Court has rejected a former CIA operative’s appeal against extradition to Italy to serve a six-year sentence for her part in the U.S. extraordinary renditions program, a court official said yesterday. Sabrina De Sousa’s (pictured) only remaining recourse to avoid being sent to Italy would be to appeal to Portugal’s Constitutional Court, arguing her extradition order is unconstitutional. De Sousa’s lawyer is Manuel Magalhaes e Silva, a former member of a pre-handover Macau government.

NATURE The world’s count of wild tigers roaming forests from Russia to Vietnam has gone up for the first time in more than a century, with 3,890 counted by conservation groups and national governments in the latest global census, wildlife conservation groups said.