World news

NATO summit to disrupt shipping

Istanbul, Turkey Oil tankers and ships carrying explosives or other dangerous material will not be allowed to pass through the Bosporus Strait during the NATO summit this month, officials said Thursday.

The decision came as part of heightened security in Istanbul ahead of the June 28-29 summit that President Bush and other world leaders are scheduled to attend, Foreign Ministry officials said.

The narrow waterway bisecting Istanbul is part of the sole passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Security in Istanbul has been of special concern since four truck bombings blamed on a Turkish al Qaeda cell killed more than 60 people last year.

Indonesian volcano spews smoke, no lava

Tahuna, Indonesia A volcano in northeastern Indonesia erupted Thursday, sending smoke and ash nearly two miles into the air. Thousands of villagers evacuated the region earlier and there were no reports of injury.

Mount Awu spewed smoke about 10,000 feet into the air, but there was no lava flow from the volocano on Sangihe Island, 1,350 miles northeast of Jakarta, said Syamsul Rizal, a volcanologist sent to the island.

Signs of an impeding eruption began last week, and authorities later evacuated thousands of people living in a radius of 4 miles around Mount Awu. Nearly 12,000 people are being housed in the nearby town of Tahuna, in government offices and other public buildings.

Jamaican gay rights leader killed

Kingston, Jamaica Amnesty International on Thursday condemned the grisly killing of Jamaica’s best-known gay rights activist and urged police to investigate whether he was the victim of a hate crime.

The mutilated body of Brian Williamson, 59, was found at his Kingston home on Wednesday, hours after he was seen meeting with two men. Police said it appeared that Williamson was a robbery victim.

But the London-based human rights group urged authorities “to keep an open mind as to the motive behind this killing.”

Williamson was a founding member of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, known as J-FLAG, the Caribbean island’s only gay rights group. He often spoke out in defense of gays and HIV/AIDS victims, a rarity in a country where homosexuals face widespread harassment.

Wiiliamson was found lying in a pool of blood with stab wounds to his head, neck and stomach, probably from a machete, police said.

Man’s remains found 20 years after he died

Tokyo The decomposed body of a man dressed in pajamas was discovered in an abandoned Tokyo apartment building 20 years after he is believed to have died, police said Thursday.

A Tokyo Metropolitan Police official said construction workers were preparing to tear down the building earlier this month when they found the man’s skeletal remains laying face-up on a mattress on the tatami reed mat floor of a second-floor room.

The morning edition of a newspaper dated Feb. 20, 1984, was on a table and a calendar, opened to the same month, hung on the wall, said the official.

The man, identified only as former worker of the company that built the apartments, was in his mid-50s when he divorced his wife, left home and moved into the building in the early 1980s.

Police think the man had been unable to repay bank loans and had stopped showing up for work.

But nobody noticed his death because the real estate agency managing the property went out of business after the building was completed in 1973 without ever having found renters, he said. The building had been unoccupied since it was completed.

The man’s remains have been returned to his ex-wife, the official said.