Island didn’t get tsunami warning

A powerful earthquake struck early today near the South Pacific nation of Tonga, prompting tsunami warnings for as far away as Fiji and New Zealand. But the warning never reached Tonga.

There were no reports of injuries from the quake or tsunami, and a Tongan official said a few broken windows were the extent of the damage. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu lifted its warning for all areas within two hours. It said there was no data indicating that the earthquake generated a giant wave.

The magnitude 7.9 earthquake, classified by the U.S. Geological Survey as “major,” struck about 95 miles south of Neiafu, Tonga, and 1,340 miles north-northeast of Auckland, New Zealand. It occurred 20 miles beneath the sea floor.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said its first alert went out 16 minutes after the earthquake but was not received in Tonga because of a power failure there.

Belgrade, Serbia-Montenegro

EU suspends talks for Mladic inaction

The European Union on Wednesday suspended aid and trade talks with Serbia over its failure to arrest war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, the ex-Bosnian Serb army commander indicted for genocide in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.

Mladic is wanted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, charged in the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica. He is thought to be getting protection from hard-liners in the army and his Serb wartime allies.

Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, said Serbian authorities knew Mladic’s location as recently as 10 days ago and could have arrested him before he disappeared again.

She said Mladic is hiding in the Belgrade region and changing apartments daily, adding that she suspects he is eluding arrest with inside information.

Beijing

Church elevates another bishop

For the second time in four days, China’s government-sponsored Roman Catholic Church consecrated a new bishop without the pope’s approval Wednesday, casting a chill on what had been promising efforts to end half a century of hostility between China and the Vatican.

The new bishop, Liu Xinhong, was installed as Anhui province’s top prelate in a morning ceremony at St. Joseph’s Church in Wuhu, about 100 miles south of Nanjing, according to a church official who declined to be identified. His ascension followed the consecration Sunday of Ma Yinglin as bishop of Kunming, in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, in spite of a request from the Vatican for more time to consider whether he could meet the pope’s approval.

Elevation of the two new bishops was organized by the official Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which administers about a third of China’s more than 10 million Catholics under the authority of the Communist Party and the government’s Religious Affairs Bureau, but not the pope.