Philippines

Pesticide blamed in 27 student deaths

Laboratory tests show that 27 schoolchildren who died after eating cassava roots last week were poisoned with pesticide, health experts said Monday.

Authorities earlier said they suspected the victims from Mabini town on central Bohol island were sickened with cyanide poisoning that occurs if the starchy cassava roots are not properly cooked.

But Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit told a news conference that tests showed pesticide was likely the cause.

Vendors who sold sweetened cassava roots as recess snacks to the children — most ages 7 to 13 — last week denied that they improperly prepared the food.

One of the two vendors was among 103 patients who were admitted to four hospitals. The other was in police custody to protect her from outraged parents. Authorities have not ruled out criminal charges.

Taiwan

Lawmakers protest anti-secession law

Angry Taiwanese lawmakers burned China’s flag in protest Monday and the island denounced a new anti-secession law in Beijing as a “serious provocation” while Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao warned the United States to stay on the sidelines of the dispute.

An aide to Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, Cabinet spokesman Cho Jung-tai, called the new law “tantamount to an authorization of war.” The law sets conditions for when China may launch a military attack to pull the independently governed island under its wing by force.

Politicians in Taipei made plans to put as many as a million protesters on the streets March 26 in opposition to the law, a tactic taken from the playbook of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong who’ve been a thorn in Beijing’s side.

Wen, at a once-a-year news conference, described the anti-secession law the National People’s Congress approved earlier in the day as “by no means a war bill.” He said China would strive to ensure that no fighting broke out along the Taiwan Strait.

“So long as there is a ray of hope, we will do our utmost to promote a peaceful reunification,” he said.

Berlin

Book suggests Nazis tested nuclear device

Nazi scientists trying to build an atomic bomb set off a test explosion two months before the end of World War II, killing hundreds of people in eastern Germany, a German researcher claims in a book published Monday.

“Hitler’s Bomb” theorizes that the March 1945 device didn’t achieve fission, but did scatter telltale radioactive particles at the Ohrdruf test site. It also claims that Nazi Germany briefly had a working nuclear reactor, something historians generally dispute.

Author Rainer Karlsch, an economic historian, offers no first-hand proof, saying his account is an interpretation of available evidence and he hopes it will spur more research.

He said soil samples from the Ohrdruf site he had analyzed for his book turned up above-average levels of radioactive isotopes such as cesium 137 and cobalt 60, though he quotes the testers as saying the site poses no radiation hazard.

However, access to what he believes was ground zero was barred because of old munitions at the site, which served as a Soviet military training area in East Germany after the war.

A U.S. mission that arrived in Germany with American troops in 1945 to investigate the German atomic bomb program concluded that the Germans were nowhere near making a nuclear weapon.

Karlsch doesn’t claim they were near. But based on witness accounts recorded after the war, postwar Allied aerial photos and Soviet military intelligence reports, he argues that a test blast happened March 3, 1945, at Ohrdruf — then being run as a Nazi concentration camp.

Iraq

Saddam relative, ex-bodyguard arrested

Police arrested one of Saddam Hussein’s former bodyguards and a relative of the ousted leader in a raid north of Baghdad last month, the Iraqi government announced Monday.

Marwan Taher Abdulrasheed, the ex-bodyguard, and Abdullah Maher Abdulrasheed, the brother-in-law of Saddam’s son Qusay, were arrested Feb. 8 in a joint Iraqi-U.S. raid on one of Saddam’s former houses outside the city of Tikrit, about 85 miles north of the capital, according to Iraqi Maj. Jamal Hussein of the military’s Joint Coordination Center.

Marwan Taher Abdulrasheed had been involved in a “number of attacks against the security forces,” a government statement said, and “it is strongly believed” that Abdullah Maher Abdulrasheed financed terrorist operations with money he received from Qusay Hussein, who was killed along with his brother Uday in a July 2003 shootout with U.S. troops.