TOKYO — A team of U.S. experts will begin disabling North Korea’s nuclear facilities on Monday, the U.S. envoy said Saturday, marking a major concrete step by the communist country in scaling back its atomic program. Top U.S. envoy Christopher Hill said that the team would travel today to North Korea’s main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang. Hill said the group, which arrived in Pyongyang on Thursday, would then start disabling the country’s sole functioning reactor there and two other facilities on Monday.
Haiti: Storm death toll at 143
Thousands of Haitians sought shelter in schoolhouses Saturday as the death toll from Tropical Storm Noel rose to 143 across the Caribbean. Heavy rains continued to pound Haiti, leaving U.N. and Haitian officials temporarily stranded as they toured Haiti’s flooded southern peninsula. Noel is the deadliest storm of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season, with the greatest devastation on the waterlogged island of Hispaniola, shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Indonesia: Eruption feared
Villagers fled the slopes of one of Indonesia’s deadliest volcanos Saturday after seismic readings indicated that an eruption had started after weeks of heightened activity. But a senior government volcanologist said late Saturday that monitoring equipment close to the crater of Mount Kelud was still working, indicating that there had been no eruption. The volcano in the heart of densely populated Java island was shrouded in fog and no visual confirmation of the eruption reports was possible.
Egypt: Mubarak son gets key job
Egypt’s ruling party appointed President Hosni Mubarak’s son to an important new committee Saturday in a move seen as further paving the way for the younger Mubarak to succeed his father. Gamal Mubarak has risen dramatically in the ranks of the party since the National Democratic Party’s last convention in 2002 and is now number two in the party and head of the powerful policy making committee. Both father and son have denied the succession rumors.
Venezuela: Anti-Chavez protest
Thousands of Venezuelans on Saturday protested proposed constitutional changes that would allow President Hugo Chavez to run for re-election indefinitely and give him the power to create provinces governed by federally appointed officials. Waving Venezuelan flags, government opponents jammed a downtown Caracas avenue where opposition leaders warned that 69 amendments approved by the National Assembly would severely weaken democracy and violate civil liberties.
Michigan: Ford, union agree
The United Auto Workers union reached a tentative contract agreement Saturday with Ford Motor Co., the last of the Big Three automakers participating in a historic round of negotiations that has slashed wages and changed the way health care is provided to retirees. A person briefed on the deal said Ford scaled back plans to close some U.S. plants and has promised to make significant product investments to ensure those plants will remain open for now. Ford lost more than $12 billion last year.
California: Chain-reaction crash
More than 100 cars and trucks crashed on a fog-shrouded freeway Saturday, killing at least two people and injuring dozens more, the California Highway Patrol said. Eighteen big rigs were involved in the massive pileup on Highway 99 just south of Fresno as patches of dense fog obscured visibility on the heavily traveled roadway, CHP officials said. “It looked like something out of a movie, walking up and seeing all the cars mangled and crushed,” a CHP Officer said. A 5-year-old boy and a 26-year-old man traveling in separate vehicles were killed in the chain-reaction collisions around 7:45 a.m., he said.
Illinois: New charges for priest
A retired Jesuit priest convicted of molesting two boys was taken into custody in Chicago Friday on a charge that he molested a boy he took on a trip to Switzerland and Austria seven years ago, prosecutors announced. The Rev. Donald McGuire, 77, has been free on bond while appealing his conviction last year in Wisconsin that he molested two high school students in the 1960s. He was turned over to Immigration and Customs agents on the new charge of traveling overseas to engage in sex with a minor.
Massachusetts: Northeast storm
High wind and heavy surf hit parts of the Northeast on Saturday as the remnants of Hurricane Noel blustered across the open Atlantic. The worst of the storm was expected to hit Cape Cod at high tide, a National Weather Service meteorologist said. High wind warnings were in effect for coastal New Jersey, the eastern tip of New York’s Long Island, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine. Coastal flood warning and flood watches were in effect up and down the New England coast.
From Herald news services
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