LONDON - A 162-year-old Christmas card - one of the first ever printed - sold at auction Saturday for $16,000.
The hand-colored card is one of about 10 surviving from an original batch of 1,000 printed in 1843, auctioneer Henry Aldridge said.
The cards were commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, a Londoner who is generally recognized as the inventor of the commercial Christmas card.
The card was bought at the auction in Devizes by Jakki Brown, editor and co-owner of Progressive Greetings magazine and general secretary of the Greeting Card Association.
The card was originally sent to a Miss Mary Tripsack, a close friend of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the wife of the poet Robert Browning. The sender is unknown.
Although wood engravers produced prints with religious themes in Europe in the Middle Ages, the first commercial Christmas and New Year's cards are believed to have been produced by Cole in 1843.
Bill blocking inspectors closer to passage in Iran
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's hard-line constitutional watchdog approved a bill Saturday blocking international inspections of atomic facilities if the nation is referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, state-run television reported.
The ratification by the Guardian Council means the bill - overwhelmingly approved by Parliament last month - now needs just a presidential signature to become law. It was not clear when that would take place.
Bird flu kills 1,600 birds in Ukraine's first outbreak
KIEV, Ukraine - Ukraine recorded its first bird flu outbreak Saturday, prompting the president to declare a state of emergency in four Crimean villages where more than 1,600 chickens and geese have died of the disease.
Birds found dead over the past two months in the Black Sea peninsula tested positive for the H5 subtype, officials said.
Samples were sent to laboratories in Italy and Britain for further tests to determine whether the disease could be the deadly H5N1 strain, which is being monitored for fear it could mutate into a form that is easily transferable among humans. The results are expected by Thursday, Agriculture Minister Oleksandr Baranivsky said.
Pro-reunification party wins Taiwanese election
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwan's opposition Nationalist Party won an overwhelming victory in islandwide municipal elections Saturday, putting it in position to push its agenda of reunification with China during the 2008 presidential campaign.
With more than 97 percent of the votes counted, Nationalist candidates or Nationalist allies won 17 of the 23 constituencies, while candidates of President Chen Shui-bian's ruling Democratic Progressive Party were assured of victory in six, according to results from the Central Election Commission.
The campaign has been marked by widespread allegations of vote buying and fraud.
Flood kills Chinese miners; toll mounts in mine blast
BEIJING - The death toll from a coal mine explosion that happened a week ago in northern China reached 169 Saturday, making it one of the country's worst mining disasters in decades, while a separate flood trapped 42 miners, officials said.
At the private Sigou Coal Mine in Henan province, 76 workers were underground when the mine flooded around 11:40 p.m. Friday, Xinhua said. Thirty-four escaped.
About 200 rescuers were trying to reach those trapped, Xinhua said, but there was no indication if there were survivors.
Hurricane Epsilon poses no threat to land
MIAMI - Epsilon, a rare December hurricane in a record-breaking season, moved out in the open Atlantic on Saturday, where it posed no threat to land.
The record 14th hurricane of the season had top sustained wind near 75 mph, the National Hurricane Center said. The threshold for a hurricane is 74 mph. At 10 p.m. EST, Epsilon was centered about 855 miles west-southwest of the Azores and moving east at nearly 13 mph.
