World in brief: 32 bodies pulled from bus wreck

Soldiers and rescue workers on Thursday recovered 32 bodies from a bus buried in a landslide but held out little hope of finding survivors.

Frantically digging through tons of earth and rock, hundreds of soldiers and rescue workers braved threats of additional slides to pull victims from the bus, which officials said was carrying between 40 and 60 passengers.

Among those yet to be identified were two children and a woman found clutching a child in her arms.

MIAMI

Small reduction in political prisoners

The number of political prisoners in Cuba dropped by 37 in the past six months, but the island still has the highest number of such prisoners per capita in the world, according to a new report by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

Human rights activists warn against reading too much into the drop from 283 to 246 because it was largely a result of the release of prisoners who completed long sentences.

Others were freed for medical reasons “because the Cuban government simply didn’t want them to die in jail,” said Juan Carlos Acosta, director of the Miami-based Accion Democratica Cubana, which distributed the report.

BRUSSELS, Belgium

Dinner guest finds frozen corpses

Police detained a man in eastern Belgium after a dinner guest found the bodies of the host’s wife and stepson in a freezer, authorities said Thursday.

The female guest opened the freezer while helping to clear up after a dinner with a group of friends Tuesday at the man’s home in the city of Verviers, 78 miles east of Brussels, said Christine Wilwerth of the city prosecutor’s office.

The bodies appeared to have been kept in the deep freeze for several weeks.

Wilwerth said the suspect acknowledged that a quarrel had escalated and his wife had been stabbed.

From wire reports