World briefs 3/19/06

World's water problems mostly from farming

MEXICO CITY -- Farms and their wasteful irrigation systems are a major contributor to water scarcity around the globe, experts at a world water summit said Saturday. Farming accounts for 70 percent of the water consumed and much of it is wasteful, said representatives of 130 nations at the World Water Forum discussing water management. "Farmers are central to the whole picture. They use the majority of the world's water, and farmers are where most of the world's poverty is concentrated," Patrick McCully, director of International River Network, a nongovernmental organization, said at the forum.

Milosevic buried after emotional farewell

POZAREVAC, Serbia-Montenegro -- Slobodan Milosevic was laid to rest Saturday beneath a tree at the family estate in his hometown, a quiet end for a man blamed for ethnic wars that killed 250,000 people in one of the turbulent Balkans' bloodiest chapters. The late Serbian leader's burial, a week after his death while on U.N. trial charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, followed an emotional farewell in Belgrade that drew at least 80,000 Serb nationalists and another in his birthplace attended by up to 20,000 admirers. No immediate members of Milosevic's family attended, and no priest officiated at the interment because Milosevic was an avowed atheist.

Many elderly S. Korean farmers face eviction

SEOUL, South Korea -- Hundreds of elderly farmers face forcible eviction from their land to allow the expansion of a U.S. military base near Seoul, according to the human rights group Amnesty International. Some of the farmers -- mainly in their 60s and 70s -- suffered bloodied noses and several human rights activists were detained during clashes with riot police earlier this month, the London-based group said in a statement posted on its Web site Friday. Police had come to evict the farmers from their homes in Daechuri village in Pyongtaek, 50 miles south of Seoul, it said.

-- From wire reports

New Zealander missing after volcano hot spot erupts

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- A young conservation worker who was checking a volcano's crater lake when it unexpectedly burst to life, spewing mounds of ash and soot, most likely died in the eruption in the remote nature reserve, a conservation official said Saturday. "He was at the exact epicenter of the massive destruction," said Conservation Minister Chris Carter after speaking to a rescue worker who had witnessed the devastation. Carter said the rescuer estimated the worker, who left an hour before the eruption for the crater lake for a routine check of the water temperature, had only a "1 to 2 percent chance" of surviving. The eruption in one of Raoul Island's three main craters threw rocks and boulders into the air and buried the area around the lake in mud and ash up to 16 feet deep.

-- From wire reports