Beijing

Team offers advice for SARS control

China must tighten regulations on wildlife trade and train health-care workers in anti-infection techniques if SARS is to be controlled permanently, a team of international experts said Thursday after visiting the province where the disease first surfaced.

The team of U.N. and World Health Organization investigators and Chinese government officials toured Guangdong, on the southern Chinese coast, this month in part to search for the “animal reservoir” — the wild animal population where the virus is thought to have originated.

Many health officials believe SARS jumped from wildlife to humans in Guangdong, where consuming exotic creatures is a traditional practice and considered a delicacy.

In May, at the height of the outbreak, China banned the sale and trade of 54 types of wildlife — including the weasel-like civet cat.

Australia

Ex-official says Iraq intelligence distorted

A former senior intelligence analyst Friday accused Prime Minister John Howard’s government of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq to justify sending Australian troops to war.

The claim came on the first day of a Senate inquiry into the intelligence used by Howard to justify sending 2,000 troops to fight alongside U.S. and British troops in Iraq and mirrored the problems facing President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Andrew Wilkie, who quit as a senior intelligence analyst in March to protest the government’s support for war in Iraq, told the Senate that information passed to the government had been distorted for political purposes.

Asked if he was accusing Howard’s office of “sexing up” intelligence — a phrase seized on by British tabloids — Wilkie replied, “Yes, it was sexed up.”

Vatican City

Report: Pius XII was anti-Nazi in private

Pope Pius XII, accused by some historians and Jewish leaders of not speaking out against the Holocaust, expressed strong anti-Nazi views in private talks with diplomats, a Catholic magazine said Thursday, citing a newly released document.

The Sept. 1 issue of the Jesuit weekly America cites a report from the recently released diplomatic papers of Joseph P. Kennedy, who served as U.S. ambassador to Britain from 1938 to 1940.

Charles R. Gallagher, a Jesuit and U.S. historian, writes that in April 1938, the ambassador met in Rome with Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII in 1939 a few months before the outbreak of World War II.

Pacelli, then Vatican secretary of state, gave Kennedy a report denouncing Nazism because it attacked “the fundamental principle of the freedom of the practice of religion,” Gallagher wrote, quoting from the report.

Mexico City

Real bullets in movie lead to killing, arrest

An actor in a low-budget action movie shot and killed a colleague after apparently being handed a gun with real bullets instead of blanks, authorities said Thursday.

Flavio Peniche, the brother of internationally known soap-opera star Arturo Peniche, was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and then released on nearly $40,000 bail Wednesday, according to the attorney general’s office of Morelos state, just south of Mexico City.

The shooting occurred Saturday during filming of “The Scorpion’s Vengeance” at a hotel in Cuernavaca.

According to a police report faxed to The Associated Press, the scene called for Peniche to shoot six people. After firing what were supposed to be two blanks, he realized that actor Antonio Velasco had been wounded, and the crew ran for help.

Velasco died shortly afterward at a Cuernavaca hospital.