World Briefly

Authorities confiscated more than $200 million in U.S. currency from a band of methamphetamine producers headquartered in one of Mexico City’s ritziest neighborhoods, they said Friday, calling it the largest drug cash seizure in history. Two of seven people arrested Thursday were Chinese nationals. The investigation began in December when authorities seized 19 tons of pseudoephedrine, a cold medicine that is a key ingredient in the production of methamphetamine, at a port on the Pacific Coast.

North Korea will not stop its nuclear activity unless $25 million of its funds held in a Macau bank are fully released, the regime’s top nuclear envoy said Saturday. Banco Delta Asia had been blacklisted by Washington since September 2005 for its complicity in North Korean money laundering. This week, the U.S. Treasury Department said that ties would be cut with the bank and the U.S. financial system, which might lead regulators to unfreeze a portion of the money.

Saadoun Hammadi, a longtime ally of Saddam Hussein and one of the most senior Iraq Baath party leaders, has died in a hospital in Germany, a Baath party spokesman and the party’s Web site said. Hammadi died late Wednesday in a German hospital, Hisham Odeh said. Hammadi held foreign and oil ministry posts, and was the last speaker of the Iraqi Parliament up to the 2003 U.S. invasion.

From Herald staff reports