World briefs 15A

Chinese police detain man in school knife attack

BEIJING -- Police have detained a man accused of slashing as many as nine boys to death as they slept in their high school dormitory in central China, state media reported Saturday. Yan Yanming, 21, was reported to police by his mother after he tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide following the attack late Thursday in the city of Ruzhou, the Xinhua News Agency said. It said he confessed and said he acted out of hatred for the students, but didn't give details. Xinhua put the death toll in the attack at eight, but another state-run news agency, the China News Service, said nine students were killed. It was the fourth knife attack reported at a Chinese school or day care center in as many months. The earlier assaults left one child dead and 42 people injured.

Army deserter sobs after release from prison

CAMP ZAMA, Japan -- U.S. Army deserter Charles Jenkins was released from military jail on Saturday after serving 25 days for abandoning his squadron in 1965 and defecting to North Korea, where he lived for nearly four decades. Jenkins, 64, left the prison at the U.S. naval base in Yokosuka and was taken by helicopter to the Camp Zama Army base, where he was to join his family for several days before moving to his wife's hometown in northern Japan. "Forty years is a long time," a sobbing Jenkins, still in uniform, said after he arrived at Camp Zama. "My plan is to stay in Japan, if they will accept me. I want to go back to the United States, but only once. With my wife, I'll live in Japan, with my family."

Russian forces kill alleged aide to Chechen leader

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia -- Russian security forces killed an alleged top aide to radical Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev after he put up armed resistance to arrest, the Federal Security Service said Friday. Akhmed Sambiyev, known as the "White Arab," was killed late Thursday in a confrontation with police and security service officers in a private house in Ingushetia, a southern Russian region bordering on Chechnya, said Yuri Smolyaninov, a spokesman for the Ingush branch of the security service. Sambiyev, who the ITAR-Tass news agency said was either Syrian or Turkish, was an expert in explosives with close links to international terrorist groups, Smolyaninov said.

Bush urges N. Ireland's leaders to cut a deal

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- President Bush lent his weight Friday to a final push for reviving power-sharing in Northern Ireland, telling the province's Protestant leader to do his best to cut a deal with his longtime Catholic enemies. Ian Paisley, whose Democratic Unionist Party represents most of Northern Ireland's British Protestant majority, received a telephone call from Bush just before Paisley and his senior aides began to discuss the latest draft of a confidential British-Irish blueprint for compromise. Paisley -- a stridently anti-Catholic evangelist who has spent decades destroying Protestant rivals who dared compromise -- said he told Bush he wanted to reach agreement with Sinn Fein, the political face of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, but stressed that "any deal must be fair."

Pakistan bans issue of Newsweek over article

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistani authorities have banned an issue of Newsweek magazine for publishing material they said was offensive to Islam, local media reported Friday. The edition published "objectionable remarks which [were] tantamount to desecration of the Quran," Islam's holy book, the state-run agency Associated Press of Pakistan said. The issue carried a story about the slaying in the Netherlands of filmmaker Theo van Gogh and religious and ethnic divisions in Europe under the headline "Clash of Civilizations." The News, Pakistan's largest circulation English language newspaper, said Friday the banned Newsweek edition included an image taken from van Gogh's film about Islam's treatment of women that showed verses from the Quran written on the body of a semi-naked woman.

-- From wire reports