Pakistan: Boat sinks on lake;26 dead, two missing

A motorboat taking people on a sightseeing trip sank in a lake in southern Pakistan on Sunday, killing at least 26 people, police said.

The accident occurred on Khenjer Lake in the southern province of Sindh. About 28 people were onboard the small boat when it went down, said Nasir Aziz Virk, an assistant superintendent of police in the nearby city of Thatta.

When the boat suddenly went down amid strong winds, other vessels on the lake rushed to the scene and recovered several bodies, said Nadir Hussain Khoso, a district police officer.

The cause of the accident, which occurred about 70 miles east of Karachi, the capital of Sindh, was not immediately known. But police said the heavy winds or overcrowding of the boat may have caused it to sink.

New York City: New York Philharmonic moving to Carnegie Hall

The New York Philharmonic is returning to Carnegie Hall in 2006, more than four decades after it moved out to be an anchor to Lincoln Center.

The Philharmonic will benefit from Carnegie Hall’s sophisticated acoustics, which are superior to those of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. The orchestra will be a managing partner at the facility, The New York Times reported in today’s editions.

“We’ve got two major institutions — one is the greatest hall in the world, the other is the greatest orchestra in the world,” Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic’s executive director, told The Times. “This merger is to strengthen our respective positions.”

The deal leaves Lincoln Center with no long-term occupant for Avery Fisher Hall, where the orchestra has been based since 1962.

The partnership between Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic would have a combined endowment of about $350 million.

South Korea: U.S. lawmaker: North Korea will produce more nukes

North Korea told American lawmakers it already has nuclear weapons and intends to build more, a senior U.S. congressman said early today after returning from a trip to the communist state.

Rep. Curt Weldon, who led a congressional delegation that visited the North’s capital, Pyongyang, for three days ending Sunday, said North Korean officials also told them they had almost completed reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods.

“They admitted to having nuclear capability and weapons at this moment,” Weldon said at a news conference in Seoul. “They admitted to an effort to expand their nuclear production program.”

U.S. officials have said North Korea claimed at talks in April in Beijing that it already had nuclear weapons, but would give up its nuclear programs in return for economic aid and security guarantees.

Early today, Weldon, R-Pa., said North Korean officials repeated that claim and even said they planned to produce more nuclear weapons despite pressure from the United States and its allies.

“They admitted to having just about completed the reprocessing of 8,000 rods,” Wedon said.