A round-up of today's other stories in brief
Widow of suicide bomber held
LONDON -The widow of July 7th suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan was among four people being held last night after anti-terror raids linked to the London bombings.
Hasina Patel (29), her brother Arshad and two other men were detained under the Terrorism Act over suspected connections to the 2005 attacks in which 52 people died.
Police swooped just after 7am yesterday on addresses across West Yorkshire and the West Midlands.
Properties in Dewsbury, Batley, Beeston in south Leeds, and Birmingham were cordoned off for forensic investigation. - (PA)
Four oil workers kidnapped
LAGOS -Gunmen kidnapped four American oil workers from a barge off the Nigerian coast yesterday in the tenth attack on western oil facilities in nine days in the Niger Delta, home to Africa's biggest oil industry.
Unrest in the delta has already curbed output by almost one-third after a militant group warned of a "month of mayhem", despite a change in government on May 29th.
The election of a state governor from the delta as vice-president has not diluted their anger. - (Reuters)
Senior policeman shot by gunmen
CHILPANCINGO, Mexico -Gunmen disguised as federal agents shot dead the head of police in a state capital near Mexico's Acapulco beach resort yesterday, the third killing of a senior policeman in five days.
Presumed drug gang members in black fatigues shot police chief Artemio Mejia in the back in the town of Chilpancingo after he got out of his pickup truck to question them.
President Felipe Calderon has sent thousands of troops and federal police to tackle drug cartels across Mexico, but the increased fire power has failed to contain the violence, including a recent wave of attacks on senior officers. - (Reuters)
Tribunal quashes genocide finding
THE HAGUE -The UN war crimes tribunal yesterday quashed the conviction of a former Bosnian Serb army commander for complicity in genocide in the Srebrenica massacre, but told him he still had to serve 15 years for related crimes.
Vidoje Blagojevic had helped with the transfer of Bosnian Muslims from the UN's so-called safe area of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in 1995.
But judges said that without knowledge of the mass killings, Blagojevic's awareness of the transfer and other details was not enough to prove he knew of the principal perpetrators' genocidal intent beyond reasonable doubt.
They reduced his original sentence from 18 years to 15. - (Reuters)
US academic held in Tehran
WASHINGTON -A Washington-based academic with dual Iranian and US citizenship has been arrested in Tehran after meeting officials at the ministry of intelligence, her US institution said yesterday.
Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the US Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' Middle East programme, was arrested on Tuesday and taken to Tehran's Evin prison, according to a statement issued by the centre and her family. - (Reuters)
Girl's family support police
PRAIA DA LUZ -The family of the British child Madeleine McCann, who disappeared a week ago, yesterday called for an end to criticism of the police efforts to find her and for everyone to work together to trace the missing three-year-old. Relatives also rejected criticism of the girl's parents for leaving Madeleine in their apartment while they went out. - (Guardian service)