Hurricane Stan hits Mexican Gulf Coast

Veracruz, Mexico Hurricane Stan slammed into Mexico’s Gulf Coast on Tuesday, forcing authorities to close one of the nation’s busiest ports and spawning related storms across the region that left at least 66 people dead, most from landslides in El Salvador.

Stan, which whipped up maximum sustained winds of 80 mph before weakening to a tropical storm, came ashore along a sparsely populated stretch of coastline south of Veracruz, a major port 185 miles east of Mexico City.

The storm’s outer bands swiped the city, knocking down trees and flooding low-lying neighborhoods, authorities said. State officials said four people were injured, including a child, but gave no details.

All three of Mexico’s Gulf Coast crude-oil loading ports were closed Tuesday as a precaution, authorities said, but the shutdowns were not expected to affect oil prices.

Pakistan captures Taliban spokesman

Islamabad, Pakistan Pakistan said Tuesday it had captured a spokesman for the Taliban, the militia that ruled Afghanistan until it was ousted in a U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

Mullah Hakim Latifi, who has often claimed responsibility for attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces, was caught in the southwestern Baluchistan province after using a local cell phone, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said.

Baluchistan borders Afghanistan, and members of the Taliban are believed to have sought refuge in the area after the invasion.

Americans, German share physics prize

Two Americans and a German won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for optics research that is improving the accuracy of such precision instruments as GPS locators, atomic clocks and navigation systems.

Americans John L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber shared the prize with Theodor W. Haensch of Germany. Glauber, 80, of Harvard University, took half of the $1.3 million award for showing how the quantum nature of light can affect its behavior. His insights led to the work of Hall, 71, a professor at the University of Colorado, and Haensch, 63, of the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitaet in Munich. Hall and Haensch will share the other half of the prize.

Until Glauber published his theories in 1963, scientists dismissed the idea that quantum theory, which was developed to describe the behavior of particles, had any application to light. But Glauber showed that certain types of light — including lasers — could only be fully understood using quantum methods.