World briefly: Palestinian gunmen take amnesty

More than 300 gunmen from the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a violent Fatah movement offshoot, have given up their weapons as part of an amnesty deal that seeks to improve ties between Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas’s moderate Fatah leadership, a senior Palestinian security official said Sunday.

England: Lab suspect in farm disease

Biosafety experts scoured a high-security animal laboratory in Pirbright on Sunday to determine how a strain of the foot-and-mouth virus may have escaped from a lab. Officials increasingly suspect that the facility – home to a government research center and a company that makes foot-and-mouth vaccine – was the source of a recent outbreak on a nearby farm. That has raised hopes that the highly infectious disease was not spread by other animals and could be contained.

China: Crude one-child slogans ban

China has banned crude and insensitive slogans promoting the country’s one-child family planning policy, such as “Raise fewer babies but more piggies,” which have stoked anger in rural areas, state media said Sunday. Among the slogans often found painted on roadside buildings in rural areas that were forbidden were “One more baby means one more tomb” and “Houses toppled, cows confiscated, if abortion demand rejected.”