Taiwan

Skyscraper fire kills four

A fire raged through the top floors of a high-rise building Saturday in the central city of Taichung, killing at least four people before it was extinguished, officials said.

Rescue workers found the bodies of a 40-year-old security guard and three other employees of the Gold Plaza Tower, officials said.

Located close to the railway station, the 25-floor building is crowned by a revolving restaurant. The blaze was visible from far away.

No information on what caused the fire was available, but officials said it apparently started on the 18th floor and moved upward. It was not known if the blaze began inside the disco on that floor. The club can contain more than 2,000 people but was not operating when the fire erupted, officials said.

Television footage showed flames and thick black smoke billowing out of the top floors. Two helicopters rescued nine people from the roof, officials said.

People on the street fled the building covering their heads with bags to protect themselves from falling glass.

Haiti

Violence continues against peacekeepers

One Brazilian peacekeeper was wounded Saturday and the charred body of a man apparently burned alive with a tire around his neck lay in the deserted street of a slum where shots rang out and people peered fearfully from barred windows.

It was the second day of violence in Bel Air, where at least two civilians were shot and killed Friday, allegedly by Haitian police, and the U.N. mission reported two Brazilian troopers were shot by snipers.

Bel Air is a warren of alleyways lined with tin-roofed homes on a hillside behind the National Palace where Haitian police have been struggling for months to regain control from armed militants loyal to ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Brazilian troops in armored cars with mounted submachine guns moved into the neighborhood early Saturday and came under fire, said Cmdr. Carlos Chagas Braga, a spokesman for the 7,400-member U.N. peacekeeping mission led by Brazil.

He said in both instances U.N. troops did not return fire because of a policy of “shoot only when you can see your target.”

South Africa

Zimbabwe orders paper shuttered

The Zimbabwean government this week ordered the Weekly Times, an independent publication less than two months old, to close, making it the third newspaper shuttered in the past 18 months under the country’s strict media laws.

With national parliamentary elections less than five weeks away, the Zimbabwe Media and Information Commission accused the paper of violating its operating license, in which the paper promised evenhanded and objective reporting in the interest of societal good. The government ordered the paper closed on Friday.

The media commission’s chairman, Tafataona Mahoso, said the newspaper had produced coverage whose “core values, convictions and overall thrust were narrowly political, clearly partisan and even separatist, in contrast to what had been pledged,” according to an article announcing the paper’s closing on the front page of the state-controlled Herald newspaper in Harare, the capital.

The Weekly Times license was revoked for one year. Editor Diggs Dube said the paper would go to court Monday to seek to overturn the ruling. The paper, which began publishing Jan. 2, had a circulation of nearly 15,000.