Nigeria: Riot toll surpasses 200

The regional governor warned rioters would be shot on sight Sunday as hundreds of people fled the northern city of Kaduna after four days of religious violence concerning the Miss World pageant killed 200 people.

The violence between Muslims and Christians began after a newspaper article last week said Islam’s founding prophet would have chosen a Miss World contestant for a wife. The pageant was then moved to London.

By late Saturday, the Nigerian Red Cross counted 215 bodies on the streets and in mortuaries throughout Kaduna, 100 miles north of the capital, Abuja, said Emmanuel Ijewere, president of the organization. An unknown number of others killed in the riots were believed to have been buried by family members, Ijewere said.

The 80 Miss World contestants arrived Sunday in London on a hastily organized flight. The London show is scheduled for Dec. 7, the same day it had been planned for Nigeria.

Switzerland: Voters reject asylum cuts

Voters on Sunday narrowly rejected stringent new asylum laws that would have closed the nation’s borders to all but a trickle of refugees, defeating the nationalist proposal by the thinnest margin in Swiss voting history.

The proposal was opposed by 50.1 percent of voters, or 1,122,874 people. It was favored by 49.9 percent, or 1,119,452. Voter turnout was 46.7 percent.

The plan “against abuse of the right to asylum,” drawn up by hardline members of the Swiss People’s Party, would have expelled refugees arriving via any persecution-free country – in practice, all of Switzerland’s neighbors.

Sicily: Quakes rock Mount Etna

A thick river of lava flowed toward a hikers and tourist refuge on the slopes of Mount Etna after three earthquakes – two of them five minutes apart – rocked the region Sunday and sent residents fleeing their homes.

“The shaking was violent, the walls shook for what seemed like an infinitely long time,” Enrico Pappalardo, mayor of the mountainside town of Santa Venerina, told the Italian news agency ANSA.

No one was injured, and no buildings were damaged in the quakes on the eastern Sicilian volcano.

Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, began its most recent eruptions Oct. 27, spewing rivers of lava and belching out columns of thick ash and smoke that closed the nearby Catania airport for days.

China: U.S. warship visits port

The United States and China moved toward renewing strained military ties Sunday with a carefully staged visit by a U.S. warship to a Chinese port.

The port call in Qindao by the USS Paul F. Foster was the first by an American Navy vessel since last year, when Beijing and Washington blamed each other for a plane crash. Military ties all but froze over the April 2001 collision between a U.S. Navy spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea.

The USS Paul F. Foster’s visit is the first in a slew of contacts in coming weeks aimed at cementing a gradual warming of ties that began when Beijing expressed sympathy after the 9-11 terror attacks in the United States and cooperated with American anti-terrorism efforts.