Venezuela

Banks set 2-day strike

Venezuela’s currency reached a record low against the dollar Wednesday after banks said they would close for two days to support a 38-day-old strike seeking President Hugo Chavez’s ouster.

Demand for dollars soared on speculation that Chavez’s government, facing a fiscal crisis because of dwindling oil and tax revenues, would devalue the bolivar to balance its budget. Nervous depositors wanted dollars before the banks closed, not knowing what the bolivar would be worth when banks reopen next week.

Jose Torres, president of Fetrabanca, the umbrella group for bank workers unions, said banks will shut down today and Friday, adding weight to a strike that has dried up oil income in the world’s fifth largest oil exporter.

Spain

Oil tanker leak slows

With the help of frigid waters, the crew aboard a high-tech submarine has slowed the hemorrhage in the sunken oil tanker Prestige, scientists said Wednesday.

The tanker is leaking about 21,000 gallons a day, about a third less than a month ago, when the loss was 33,000 gallons a day.

Emilio Lora-Tamayo, a physicist involved in efforts to contain what is shaping up as Spain’s worst environmental disaster, attributed the slowdown in part on the near freezing temperature of the water, which makes the oil thicker.

He also credited the crew of the French research submarine Nautile, who have managed to seal six of the 20 cracks or holes detected in the ship’s two halves and partially plug two other openings.

London

Gun laws strengthened with bans on fake weapons

Britain will outlaw the carrying of air guns and mock firearms in public as part of efforts to stem rising gun crime, the government said Wednesday.

“Replica guns are often used in crime and cause real difficulties for police officers who have to decide — often in highly pressured situations — if they are real or not,” said Home Office Minister Bob Ainsworth.

Gun crimes are relatively rare in Britain, where handguns were banned in 1997 after the massacre of 16 children and a teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. But the number of crimes in which handguns were used increased by 9 percent in 2000-2001 from the previous fiscal year.

There were 73 firearms homicides in England and Wales in the 2000-2001 fiscal year, which runs from April to April. The United States, with about five times the population, had 8,719 firearm murders in 2001, according to the FBI.

England

School lunch program turns to retina scanning

A new high school said Wednesday its students will be charged for their lunches with a retina scanning device to prevent poor children who eat for free from being ridiculed in the cafeteria.

Dr. Ed Yates, headmaster of the Venerable Bede school, said the advanced eye-recognition software will be in place when the institution opens its doors to 900 students in September in Sunderland, western England.

The school was concerned that if students are forced to pay for their lunches in cash the poor ones who receive food for free could be stigmatized. So officials decided to make the entire school “cashless.”

Yates assured parents the low-intensity light of the scanning devices will be safe for all students.

Congo

U.N. investigating reports of cannibalism of Pygmies

U.N. investigators have found credible evidence that Congolese rebel troops have killed and eaten Pygmies in northeastern Congo.

Forces of the rebel Congolese Liberation Movement, or MLC, and its allied Congolese Rally for Democracy-National, RCD-N, are accused of killing and eating Pygmies in the dense tropical forests.

The two rebel factions often hire Pygmies to hunt food for them in the forests as they fight to oust the rival rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation, or RCD-ML, from mineral-rich areas of Ituri province, a U.N. official familiar with the probe said Wednesday.

If the expert hunters return empty-handed, rebel troops kill and eat them, the official said.