World in brief

Iraqi looters beware: 181 nations will be watching

WASHINGTON - Iraqi officials are cataloging items still missing from their national museum to help police around the world prevent trafficking in the stolen antiquities, a UNESCO official said Monday.

Mounir Bouchenaki, assistant director-general for culture at the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said 3,000 to 4,000 items remain unaccounted for.

Looters pillaged Iraqi National Museum, which housed one of the Middle East's leading archaeological collections, as Baghdad fell to U.S. forces in April.

Bouchenaki said museum officials are trying to compile a list of the missing items for Interpol, which coordinates information-sharing among police forces in 181 countries.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - The sixth tropical depression of the season fizzled into a tropical wave Monday and forecasters discontinued tropical storm watches throughout the Caribbean.

Sustained winds remained near 35 mph, below the 39 mph threshold at which depressions become tropical storms.

An Air Force Reserve reconnaissance plane reported a poorly organized system, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. The tropical wave was near the central Lesser Antilles moving west at 24 mph.

BEIJING - A strong earthquake hit southwestern China and collapsed several buildings, but there were no reports of injury, the official Xinhua News Agency reported today.

The magnitude-6.2 earthquake struck at 11:16 p.m. Monday in Yunnan province, about 700 miles west of Hong Kong. It was centered in the town of Tanhua and could be felt in the provincial capital of Kunming, the report said. There were no other immediate details.

A quake of magnitude 6 is capable of causing severe damage.

BRITISH WWI VET DIES: Jack Davis, believed to be Britain's oldest World War I veteran, has died at 108. Davis died Sunday at a nursing home in Stoke Hammond, England. Davis joined the army at 19 and served in France and Belgium, fighting in the 1917 Battle of Ypres.

WRITER PAROLED: Author Jeffrey Archer walked out of prison Monday, paroled after serving two years and two days of his four-year sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice. Archer, 63, had been convicted of lying during his successful 1987 libel action against the Daily Star newspaper, which claimed he had hired a prostitute.

COLOMBIAN MILITIA PLANS TO DISPERSE: About 5,000 right-wing militia fighters will gather in northwest Colombia within three months as part of a plan to demobilize by the end of 2005, the chief of the nation's largest paramilitary group said.

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